blog:Cogley

Efficient Gmail with OS X Mail.app

2012-01-08T21:37:00.001+09:00

Greetings and Happy New Year. I am using Mail.app on OS X Lion, to retrieve mail in my Google Apps for Business Gmail account, and I wanted to blog about my setup, because I think it is relatively efficient and might help others. My goals are:

To keep my inbox small, to allow Mail.app to perform well. This goes for any mailer, really. The larger the mail store, the slower it will get.
To keep minimize network traffic and keep round trip copying up and down to Gmail, to a minimum.
To be able to have a backup of mail just in case, outside the mail client.

My Formula for Mail.app Gmail Efficiency

Here is what I am doing:

To minimize network traffic, in GMail settings, I uncheck the "Show in IMAP" setting for the All Mail label, so that it does not copy down to Mail.app. If a message comes into Gmail, and this is turned on, it will download twice - to the Inbox folder and to the All Mail folder. Gmail does not store in folders, but rather works with labels, so there is some strangeness in interaction with typical IMAP clients as a result.

To keep the size of the local Inbox small, I am Archiving mail. Archiving mail in Gmail means to remove its Inbox label. It is important to note that when you Archive mail in Gmail, it just makes it disappear from the Inbox, but it is still present in All Mail.

To Archive inside the Gmail web GUI, select or open the mail, then -

… press "e" on the keyboard (see other keyboard shortcuts for Gmail). Or,
… click the Archive button on the toolbar (looks like a box with a downward-facing arrow).

There is an Archive button in Mail.app, and what this does is to move the selected mail into an Archive IMAP folder, which will be synced up to Gmail. To Archive mail using Mail.app, select or open the mail in Mail.app, then -

… press Ctrl-⌘-A to Archive it.
Confirm the email is present in the local "Archive" IMAP folder, which should be present in your Gmail folder list (in Mail.app, scroll down, in the left-hand folder list to find it).
In Gmail, once the email is copied up and synced, select the mail or mails and click the "Remove Label" button, or, press "y" on the keyboard. Use Mail.app menu Window, Activity to confirm the sync, and, observe the labels in Gmail. At first, you will still see all the mails in the Archive label marked with an Inbox label as well, but, as they are synced up, these will be removed. Once it settles down, you can Remove the Label.

Why do it this way, taking more steps? I do this because it is easier to search and select in Mail.app, than it is in Gmail. You can search on a date range in Gmail, but it is a bit fiddly.

To keep a backup of mail, just in case, I use the excellent MailSteward utility. This lets me automatically keep a database of all my mail, which I can then periodically offload to DVD, Amazon S3 or Dropbox.

Bonus Tip

If you are happy deleting unneeded mail in Gmail and not Mail.app, then you can uncheck "Move deleted messages to the Trash Mailbox" in preferences (Mail.app, Preferences, Select Account, "Mailbox Behaviors"). This way, when you delete on Mail.app, the mail is removed from the Inbox on your local system, but, only the Inbox label is removed from the message up in Gmail. You would then have to go to Gmail and delete what you want to delete.

I hope these tips help someone.

Turbulence during iCloud Restoration to Replacement iPhone 4

2011-10-20T08:44:00.001+09:00

My firm purchased the Apple "Joint Venture" service, which allows us to register our iDevices, and get priority support from the Geniuses at an Apple Store, as well as training. The home button on my iPhone 4 went wonky on me, and would not react in the normal way when pressed. So I called the JV guys up. They told me it is a typical problem, and offered to replace my iPhone in-store, since it was still covered by AppleCare.

The next day I went to my Genius appointment at the Ginza Tokyo Apple Store, and though I showed up early, they still took me, and got me set up very quickly. There were still crowds from people wanting to get the new iPhone 4S, so the Genius Bar was packed, but the JV status allowed me to get serviced immediately, which was nice. Shinji, the Genius who helped me, also set up the phone with iOS 5, so I could just get to the restoring. I was out of there in less than an hour, and bought an Apple TV on the way out, so I guess Jobs' charm is still working on me!

Restoring an iOS 5 Backup to a new iPhone 4

I took the half-setup phone back to my office, got on WiFi, and started the restore from iCloud. Basically, the settings did indeed come over, but after about an hour, I got an error saying that it could not restore everything and that I should restore from iTunes (I am not sure whether that is normal, or a problem). I also had a few prompts to enter my iCloud credentials (Apple ID and password), for whatever reason. I kept re-entering, and it finally stopped asking.

I had backups in iTunes, so I restored from that, but that did not fully work either. I had to de-attach and re-attach the phone to iTunes, then click Sync in iTunes, to get it to fully install my purchased Apps. Finally it did work, but I am not sure what VooDoo caused that.

Despite the speed bumps along the way, basically, I was able to get my iPhone 4 restored. A couple of points:

Even if you are backing up to iCloud, it is really too new to trust, so make a manual backup. Connect to iTunes, then ctrl-click on your iPhone or iPad icon in iTunes, and choose backup from the popup menu. This will force a manual backup to iTunes locally, which can be restored from.
When you are going through the restore process, persevere, even if prompted for your password multiple times.
After you restore from iCloud if that is the route you are taking, you will need to restore at least Apps directly from iTunes.
Once you restore everything, you will need to re-enter passwords for things like Mail and so on, so have those handy.

I hope this helps someone facing the same problem. Enjoy!

Softbank iPhone 4 Emoji Keyboard Troubleshooting

2011-09-03T11:41:00.001+09:00

My daughter came to me with an interesting problem with her iPhone, so I thought I would share what I learned and how I fixed the problem. The problem was, no matter what she did, the "emoji" (graphical emoticon icons) would not show up in her email app. I rarely use emoji except when emailing or texting my daughters, so I had to jump in and learn about it.

How to Fix the "Emoji Keyboard Does Not Appear in Mail" Problem on iPhone 4

First, I wanted to define the problem:

When pressing the globe icon, the emoji keyboard does not appear but it should. You can long-press or repeatedly tap the globe to get the choices to appear and indeed, it does not.
The emoji keyboard appears on "everybody elses" iPhone, meaning the teenage friends of my daughter ( :-> ) but just to be safe, I checked and indeed, it works for the other iPhones in my family as well, but not on hers.
More specifically, I can get the emoji keyboard to appear on my iPhone in the mail app, when I choose the Softbank IMAP address as the From: address and a cell phone recipient as the To:.
The emoji keyboard appears on my daughter's iPhone in the SMS/MMS app, as expected.

What I learned as I went along:

There are a whole lot of apps that purport to allow you to have emoji on your iPhone without jailbreaking, since the codes are apparently built into the IOS. Mostly they seem to have not-so-good reviews on the iTunes app store. However on iPhone 4, it appears that you just need to turn on the keyboard in Settings, General, Keyboard, International Keyboards. There is a keyboard which is specifically called "Emoji", and there are no advanced settings - it is just a toggle. I have no way of testing whether this keyboard is available for users outside Japan, since we are locked into Softbank as a carrier here.
There's a lot of voodoo out on the Internet about this problem, because a lot of people are having it and blogging about it: restart, uninstall, reinstall, sprinkle some eye-of-newt, shake-the-phone-twice-and-pee-on-your-neighbor's rosebush and so on. I tried the restarting since it is non-invasive but, until I resolved the main issue (later), restarting did not help.
The official documents say that emoji are compatible only when you send email to other carriers that support it, and, it appears it is also possible to use with Gmail and other IMAP servers, but not POP. I read that you have to choose the right email account, to be able to send from, in your mail app (again, not SMS), and also to a recipient who can accept the emoji. Somehow, Softbank seems to have got code added that limits the behavior of the keyboard selector, based on what you choose in your From: and To: in the mail app.

So as I was thinking about the third point, I thought I had better check the mail account settings, because we had set up a few different email accounts on the phone - the Softbank IMAP account that comes with the phone contract, an IMAP account and a Gmail account. Turns out that switching between all of these as the From: yields the same result - no emoji keyboard.

In the most important email account in this case, the Softbank IMAP account, I noticed that there was no main SMTP server set but that the Softbank SMTP server was indeed selected (and, mail was working fine save for this problem). When I set the Softbank SMTP server as main for the account, and restarted the iPhone, it started working. Now she can switch to the emoji keyboard as expected.

There is something in the code that controls how the emoji keyboard appears or not, based on the SMTP server that is selected, so be sure to enter the Softbank IMAP SMTP server as main, for the Softbank IMAP account you get with your contract.

The Cause of All This Strife

I believe the root cause of this problem is the automatic installer that Softbank recommends you use when setting up. When I logged in and tried setting up with it, it did not install correctly, failing to set SSL to ON, and I had to get in contact with Softbank about that one. I think that the installer also sets the main SMTP incorrectly, and is ultimately the reason so many people have this problem.

Besides being extremely lazy about this, since their auto-installer does not work, Softbank engineers are thinking too much but not enough, and ultimately causing trouble for their customers. They are trying to "make it simple" by providing an automatic scripted solution for people to get set up, but as Apple surely knows, automation like that is one of the hardest things to do because you have to consider so many angles. Better to simply leave it up to the user to learn that: "emoji work only with email accounts that can read them" because they not only did not get the installer right, they ultimately caused a greater problem with emoji not working for many.

I hope this little post helps someone out there with their emoji issues.

OS X 10.7 Lion and Lion Server Upgrade Notes

2011-07-23T01:17:00.001+09:00

In this post I will share my notes on the upgrade from OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" to 10.7 "Lion". This is not meant to be a comprehensive review but I hope someone can find some benefit in this information. I am an early adopter in most cases and a software lover (fanatic or addict might be a more appropriate adjective!), so I bit the bullet for this upgrade as soon as I could get it, knowing that I would be in for some trouble here or there. As for my background, I am a technologist mostly on the management side these days but do have a clue, and since I am not doing OS X or iOS development nor did I have time to read too much about Lion before the release, these notes represent fairly fresh eyes on the product.

Generally, my upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.7.0 went smoothly and without trouble. Developers of the software I use were on the ball, and had apps ready for Lion either off their sites or in the Apple App Store. Kudos to them and to Apple for all the hard work. Make no mistake, software is truly hard work, and to make things appear easy and to "just work", like Apple often does, requires massive effort. If it looks easy, the guts of it are hard, in the world of software. There are no magic wands, although it might appear that way.

OS X 10.7 Lion

I thought the download would take forever, but it was relatively quick after making the payment in the App Store. I feel the low price is more than fair; generous even, given the value provided. I did two systems: my home system and my work system, paying for those separately. The morning download at about 7AM JST was fast, while the late afternoon download at the office was slower. Either way, it is a 4GB download.

I retrieved the file that had downloaded to the /Applications folder, before I clicked "Install", for safekeeping, and copied it to a USB stick. There is a way to convert a USB to a bootable disk to use for reinstallation, so I will revisit and do that later.

After clicking Install, the time to install was similar to past experiences with OS X upgrades. Breakfast eaten and paper read, I went back to look, and the system had rebooted into a login screen with a nice-looking "textile" background; very attractive. I used my usual account to log in, and after some grinding of gears (caches and such being created I imagine), everything pretty much came up as expected.

After the install and logging in, my first impression was that this release is a definite paradigm shift towards a more iOS like experience on OS X, given features like Launchpad and Mission Control. These take over a bit of the market share for small development houses making utilities to do a similar thing albeit in a more advanced manner. QuickSilver, LaunchBar and Spaces come to mind.

Some apps do conversions the first time you start them, like Mail and maybe Calendar. This takes a while especially if you have a massive amount of data stored.

Spotlight re-indexed after the first reboot, causing a temporary loss of Spotlight search and, full text search within Mail, for example, while the index process grinds away. Spotlight has been glitchy in the past for me, but this time "it just worked."

Lion has a monochrome palette, looking at the mostly-grey icons in Mail, Finder and Safari. Colorful icons are still present in the Launchpad and Mission Control apps. Then there are the iCal and Address Book apps which look out of character, looking like the objects they represent: iCal like a physical calendar complete with a torn paper edge and Address Book looking like an old-fashioned scheduler portfolio. They look good, but a bit out of place when compared with Mail, Finder or Safari.

Mail.app has really matured well with the Lion release, and has sharp-looking grey-on-grey icons. The problem for me is, I like to rely on color as a visual clue for speed while I work. I suppose one way of looking at it is, there are few distractions from the task at hand, and the monochromality of certain apps make it easy to concentrate on the work being done rather than on colorful icons.

Two of the key new-to-Lion features, LaunchPad and Mission Control, are very iOS-like and easy to use. For instance, to get into Mission Control, which lets you administer and move between spaces, you swipe four fingers upward on the trackpad. This is assuming you have one either on a Laptop like a MacBook Pro, or a Magic Trackpad, but I think we are in the middle of a bootstrap to make OS X very much a touch-centric OS.

An example of a really large "who moved my cheese" moment, and whopping big paradigm shift, is the scroll bars or lack thereof. Lion has the ability to allow any app that is programmed to take advantage of it, to run full screen. This looks fantastic, in apps like Mail, Safari, and even the Mars Edit edtor I am using to write this post. Further, the scroll bars do not appear by default a la iPhone and iPad (i.e., iOS), giving a very clean look to Lion apps, in general. Despite the relative hysteria over this predictable Apple shift (I mean, how many times have they done it in the past?), I am not finding it to be a problem at all. You just swipe two fingers on the trackpad to scroll, or for the trackpad-deficient, you can nudge your scroll button on your mouse. If you jiggle the trackpad with two fingers for instance, the scrollbars appear, and you can then drag-scroll as before and always.

The concept of scrolling itself has changed too, and this takes a bit of getting used to. On a tablet or phone, the touch paradigm means you push or pull the objects in the direction of the movement of your fingers, swiping and pinching. However, this is the opposite of what you might be used to, where pulling down on a scroll bar moves content up. With a touch device, this is the opposite, and so it is with OS X Lion. You pull or push the object (document, list, etc) with your fingers on the trackpad.

Safari has a neat visual indicator of download progress, to the right of the address bar.

Suspending with Option-Command-Eject is faster than ever. Where Snow Leopard was taking ages to go silent, Lion goes to sleep immediately. Perhaps this is due to all the various improvements in automatic file saving and caching?

After restarting a program, Lion remembers the exact state of it, and reopens the program how you left it. If you had 10 text files open, it will open them all back up the next time. I can see this might be annoying, but, it is really nice in many cases.

So far, I really like Lion. As I observe more, I will update this post.

Updates 24 July 2011

When you cmd-click a link in Safari, it now does the right thing and opens the tab next to what you were looking at, instead of way, way over in right field. I like it.

If you use Path Finder, note that it messes with Mission Control. I am not sure what I need to do yet, but I had to keep searching for the open Path Finder window in its Windows menu.

The upper-right hand "lozenge" icon is gone, having been replaced by the full screen icon. It was useful to quickly cycle between different views of the icon bar in any given application, if you option-click it. RIP.

The stop light icons in the upper left of any window seem to function the same, but they are smaller and daintier.

Pressing option while clicking a menu still works to bring up hidden options.

A lot of text-to-speech voices were added and are available as optional downloads. Check out the Speech preferences panel.

Updates 3 Aug 2011

Finally, a security basic has been improved, in that you can easily set your mac to lock after screen inactivity or screensaver activity. System Preferences, Security and Privacy, General.

An irritation is, Lion spell-checks everything everywhere automatically, making it a bit difficult to type, sometimes. It is the iOS paradigm for sure. You can toggle this in System Preferences, Language and Text, Text, Correct Spelling Automatically. It requires a restart.

OS X 10.7 Lion Server

Luckily, my firm was not making use of too many of the features of Snow Leopard Server, or this upgrade would have been really painful. When I upgraded to Lion Server, a lot of stuff just broke, unfortunately, but more on that below.

When you go to buy Lion Server from the App Store, you are told that both programs need to be purchased, and it is just as easy as the client to install. XCode and the Lion Server Administration tools are available as separate downloads. When you download XCode, despite the fact that it is put into /Applications, you still need fo find and run the XCode install program.

You can still use Workgroup Manager and the Server Admin app, but Lion presents the Server app as the primary admin tool. The problem with this is, the Server app is overly simplistic. Where as Server Admin had many settings, Server.app has only 1 or 2 per service, and not all services came through the upgrade unscathed.

My firm was primarily using Open Directory, Apache, Wiki, Mail, MySQL, and some development tools on our Snow Leopard server. Some problems occurred with each:

Open Directory - some user IDs broke and I had to recreate them.

Mail Server - Lion is still using postfix, but, the upgrade broke our aliases in /etc/aliases. When I told postfix how to find the aliases file, in main.cf, mail started to flow again. That being said, there is nowhere to add virtual domains and so on and so forth, like you could do with Snow Leopard Server.

Apache - the virual hosts settings do not work, and I lost a whole range of websites in this. Virtual Hosting is the most basic thing, so it was a shame that Apple could not get this one right.

Wiki - the wiki is now being served out of the postgresql database (user collab, db collab), instead of out of the Collaboration folder. Further, the looks have been generified so you no longer have the ability to customize each wiki. However, I would say the usability of the wiki went up considerably from an editor standpoint. We still cannot edit the Wiki pages using an iPad.

MySQL - is no more, though I imagine you can install it some how. Lion server comes with PostGreSQL rather than MySQL but there is no GUI for it at all. You are stuck with psql or perhaps Tuples.app.

My feeling is, Apple are aiming Lion Server at the SMB market, and shutting out businesses that really want to push the envelope on Lion Server.

If that is the case, is it not strange to have so many troubles upgrading, or to have no easy way to back up the wiki, without hiring a tech to assist.

Updates 3 Aug 2011

Setting up notifications on the wiki was difficult, because apparently the wiki recognizes only its own hostname. Perhaps I misunderstood something, but for me, entering preferred addresses for each user did not work. I had to use username@my.host.name.com and set up a .forward file in each home folder. Definitely not something for the uninitiated.

In Conclusion

I will add more as I discover. Hope this was helpful.

Important info from US Embassy to People Stranded in Japan

2011-03-12T18:28:00.001+09:00

The American Chamber of Commerce sent this message from the US Embassy in Japan. Please forward.

March 12, 2011 14:20
This warden message is being issued by the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo to advise U.S. citizens residing or traveling in Japan of ways to let family and friends know your status. This information is also being posted on the Embassy website to help family members to get the status of the person they are looking for.
For information regarding tsunami warnings issued by the Japan Meteorological Agency, please see the JMA website: http://www.jma.go.jp/en or http://www.jma.go.jp/en/tsunami/
We understand that there are limited flights departing from Narita and Haneda airports in the Tokyo area. If you trying to fly out from Japan, please contact your airline to see if it is scheduled to depart.
For those who are in Japan and wish to inform of us of your condition, please send an e-mail to <JapanEmergencyUSC@state.gov> and provide the following information:
Full Name
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
As much information as possible regarding your physical location (address, hotel name, etc.) and contact information (home phone, cell phone, email address, etc.) within Japan.
Please also in your e-mail please state that we may your release information to people who may contact us regarding your welfare.
We encourage you to try to contact your family and friends. Possible ways to inform your family of your situation:
1. While we understand that there have been disruptions in communications in Japan, including the interruption of internet and mobile telephone service, we encourage you to continue your efforts to be in contact with your loved one(s) using SMS texting and other social media (e.g., FaceBook, My Space, Twitter, etc) that your loved one(s) may use.
Other possible ways to inform your family of your situation:
2. Google
Google has created the site, "Google Person Finder".
http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=en
If you are in Japan, you can post messages about your whereabouts. A person looking for you can type in your name to find out if you are safe. Similarly, your family or friends may have posted a message that they are looking for you.
3. Cell Phone Messages
If you have a cell phone in Japan, you can post messages via your cell phone provider. Family and friends who know your cell phone company can check the cell phone company's website below and type in your phone number to see any message you have left. The available areas are Aomori, Miyagi, Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures.
For Docomo users:
http://dengon.docomo.ne.jp/top.cgi
For KDDI (Ezweb) users:
http://dengon.ezweb.ne.jp/
For Softbank users:
http://dengon.softbank.ne.jp/
For Wilcom users:
http://dengon.willcom-inc.com/dengon/Top.do
For Emobile users:
http://dengon.emnet.ne.jp/
Another way to find out:
http://dengon.emnet.ne.jp/
Please continue to monitor the Embassy's website, http://japan.usembassy.gov/, for updated information.
For telephone inquiries, please call 202-501-4444 or 1-888-407-4747.
US Embassy Tokyo

New: "Special Ops" Backpack from KILLSPENCER

2011-02-08T23:35:00.001+09:00

After quite a bit of back-and-forth, since my Japan-based credit card and Killspencer's card processing software were working together as well as oil and water, I finally got my Special Ops backpack the other day. Killspencer's founder Spencer Nikosey was fantastic while working through the card issues, and he soon reported that the bag had been made and was being shipped, after about two weeks' lead time.

I wanted to buy a backpack not a brief, because I cycle to the station and back, and so welcome the stability, however I did not want to look like I was going to mount an assault on Everest (Dude, don't forget your crampons, and you got the pick-axe?), and, I wanted to get one that was sufficiently business-like that I would not be embarrassed to take it to a meeting. I wanted the pack to be a little lighter than what I was using, a Crumpler Sinking Barge backpack for a laptop and a medium size DSLR, but I wanted it to be more compact, because the ol' Barge is Bulbous. Really, really bulbous. I find myself making sheepish excuses for the Crumpler's girth - say, can I move this meeting table so I can fit my bag in the room? Uh, no.

Since I just need my 15" Macbook Pro, accessories, phone, wallet, and since I mostly carry the somewhat-compact Ricoh GXR camera, I thought there must be a smaller, slimmer, more compact backpack available somewhere. So, tenacious researcher that I am (er, anal retentive?), for a couple of months I researched. I looked at a lot of bags in person and on line, including all the usual suspects like Brenthaven, Tumi, Schlesinger, Samsonite, Tom Bihn, Spire, various hand-made bags and some Japanese brands like Manhattan Passage and Porter.

I own or have owned the following:

Crumpler—I have the Sinking Barge DSLR-and-laptop backpack, but it really sticks out, off your back, and is fairly heavy to accommodate the DSLR padding. I like it though, basically.
Tumi—expensive, given that the strap grommets ripped out after less than a year of use, and a pain to get any warranty assistance.
Brenthaven—amazing warranty support, high quality, but the backpack for holding the MBP (granted, 17") is pretty massive, so that was a no. It weighs even more than my Crumpler. I use and like a lighter-weight Brenthaven brief, but a brief is pretty unstable on a bike.
Schlesinger—kind of a non-starter in Japan, especially if you have to send things back and forth to the US, what with the duty for leather being something like 50%. I had one of their leather briefs before, and liked it, but it did not give very good protection to a laptop.
Samsonite—went to the shop near Tokyo station, and did not really like the backpacks they had there. Love my Samsonite suitcases, though.
Manhattan Passage—they make a large number of bags with an insane number of pockets and variations, but the so-called "three way" models, which are briefs with hide-a-way straps, did not impress for whatever reason. I own and like one of their small shoulder bags, which is just right for a novel, a phone, a wallet, pens and so on.
Porter—this is a Japanese brand; they make some nice bags, but, they are expensive for what you get. I wavered between one of their backpacks and the Killspencer, but I am glad I chose the way I did. The Killspencer pack is really well made, and it makes the Porter I was looking at seem positively flimsy.

After a lot of looking, I kept going back to the KILLSPENCER line. I really like the concept of military fabric being repurposed to create bags, and there really are not that many bags that properly hold a MBP 15" but are also compact, I found.

Well: good things are worth the wait, and this item was well worth it.

Special Ops Right out of the Box

First impressions over two days of use were these:

It is Made in the USA. That is important to me, so long as the quality is top-class. I live here in Japan, and indeed do buy Japanese, but more and more the world seems to be about cheap goods, so you see a lot of stuff made everywhere but Japan and the US. I am happy to pay more for quality.
The attention to detail, right down to the embossed Civil War style logo on the wrapping paper, is exemplary. No loose threads. No weird seams. Just solid consistency and quality.
The black twill fabric is waxed, which lends a nice tactile and slightly-sticky feel to the bag and its optional Accessory Case. It even smells good.
The bag feels really solid, especially when it is loaded. It somehow stands on its own, as well, which is something I wanted but gave up on, so, a bonus. There is a handle at the top, with a removable leather handle encircling it. The handle cover has pull-the-dot snaps, and can be removed and therefore probably replaced. It feels good in the hand while carrying, even when the bag is loaded down. Generally speaking, the backpack is lighter than something similar in leather would be.
The Riri "Aquazip" zippers seem waterproof, and I imagine when combined with the waxy finish, will be a winning combination against Japan's rainy season.
The shoulder straps look a bit slim compared to the usual massive ones you see on other packs, but they are well balanced with the bag, are actually comfortable in use, and their metal buckles are well-designed, with a simple-yet-ingenious locking rocker mechanism. This bag has none of the ubiquitous nylon buckles you see so commonly.
The approach to space seems to be: "you decide what to do with it". It does not have a plethora of pockets. Rather, the main compartment is just a large compartment with a couple side pockets for a pen and maybe a business or credit card holder. There is an outside pocket for a wallet and so on. The laptop pocket is next to your back, and fits the 15" MBP snugly and perfectly. You can get an external "Accessory Case" pouch, suitable for an iPod or phone, or probably a pack of cigarettes if that's your vice.
Branding is subtle, with a good-looking black KILLSPENCER leather logo label at the bottom of the back pad, and a white-on-black fabric label on the inner side of the accessory pouch.
There are three horizontally-oriented "Alice Clip Attachment Point" webbing straps for attaching accessories to, along each side. Today, I found out I can stuff an umbrella down the side inside these webbing straps. It was a very simple matter to attach the accessory pouch as well; just open the sliding "Alice" connector clips, position them so they clip over the webbing strap, and then slide the locking pin into place. Nice and simple.
The bag comes with a wall-mount "hub" system. You screw this into your wall, and then you can hang the 'pack by its grommet, which is mounted in stiff leather right between the tops of the straps.

A Couple Small Things

There were a couple small challenges I am working through:

The main compartment is fairly large vertically, so you need some way of organizing the space. A folio or some kind of binder might make sense if you have a lot of business papers like I do, because there are no accordion pockets like in a briefcase. I am using a Moleskine folio and a ThinkTank Photo cable management bag to keep things from flopping around inside. Something custom from KILLSPENCER would be very nice, but the Utility Pouch is just a tad too small for papers. Something like the unfortunately-too-large-for-the-special-ops Freudian Slip from Tom Bihn, would be perfect.
I wonder how to take care of the black twill fabric. Can I wash it? Do I need to NikWax it?
It would be nice if there were a key ring inside the 'pack, to clip the fancy keychain accessory to. Not much I can do about that but maybe in a future version...

I do get the irony of a decidedly non-military desk-jockey like me being attracted to this bag, steeped as it is in military terminology and history. But in the end, what I like about the KILLSPENCER approach is, the respect he has for both the modern "road warriors" who might buy this bag, and the real warriors in our military.

Well, that is about it. I am really impressed with the bag, and like it a lot! Please see the photoset here.

Hope this review helps someone.

Geek Out: Scheduled Indexing of your Concrete5 via Cron

2011-01-21T12:23:00.001+09:00

I thought I would share how to get the automatic indexing working in a Concrete5 site, if you happen to use that CMS.

There is a special URL in the admin dashboard, which you can call from cron, to periodically re-index your site.

How to get Concrete5 to Automatically Index in One Easy Step

This is what the cron entry should look like:

27 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1 http://www.myc5domain.com/index.php/tools/required/jobs?auth=19eef....etc

This runs the job every hour at 27 minutes past. You should also be able to use other programs to hit the URL if wget is not installed:

27 * * * * /path/to/lynx -source http://www.myc5domain.com/index.php/tools/required/jobs?auth=19eef....etc

27 * * * * /path/to/curl --silent --compressed http://www.myc5domain.com/index.php/tools/required/jobs?auth=19eef....etc

Make sure you use absolute paths with cron because its environment is not the same as that of a shell. It is more limited. Also, of course the way you enter cron jobs will be different per host, and some may allow you to do it via a control panel. Either way, if you do not know how, you can ask your hosting company. This is a typical and easy thing to set up, if you provide them with your Concrete5 installation's special index URLs from the dashboard.

Enjoy!

Happy, SuperDuper! Happy.

2011-01-08T12:01:00.001+09:00

My hard-working Macbook Pro, which I keep running pretty much 24x7 without a break, had a hard disk failure yesterday. The dead disk was inconsolable, and no amount of Disk Utility or fsck or Applejack would cure its ills. I tried the usual boot-from-install-dvd-and-run-disk-utility, but that did not work either, and the fact that I do a daily Cocktail run to keep things clean wasn't relevant - a dead disk is a dead disk. Then I remembered I had been taking a nightly scheduled backup with Shirt Pocket's super-duper utility "SuperDuper!", and so a little manual reading later, I was able to get back up and running in a jiffy.

Here's How I Restored a SuperDuper! Backup to a New Hard Disk

First I went and got a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard disk / SSD drive. Pretty nifty technology. It was trivial in my 1st generation MacBook Pro unibody to remove the old disk and put the new one in. You just remove the battery, and there is a single plus screw holding in the bracket that holds the drive in. However, you do need a Torx driver to remove four small posts from the drive itself, so you can transfer then to the new drive. A Torx T6 size is what fits the model I have.

Once the drive was installed, next, I booted from my Snow Leopard DVD, and after a while I saw the familiar install screen prompting for a language choice. You will notice that a menu will appear at the top of the screen, and that you can then choose to open Disk Utility from that.

In Disk Utility booted from the DVD, I then got busy partitioning the new drive (just chose to make one big 500GB partition called "Macintosh HD" as usual), and then went to the Restore tab. It is not a problem to restore a sparseimage made from a 300GB drive, to a new 500GB drive, so I just connected the FireWire drive containing the SuperDuper! sparseimage file, and did a File, Open in Disk Utility to mount that image. I chose the backup from within the sparseimage, and told Restore to restore to Macintosh HD. About 2.5 hours later, the restore completed without incident.

I then used Disk Utility, still in setup mode, to verify the drive and repair permissions. No problems detected.

Post-Restore Tasks

There were a couple of things to do after the restore.

SuperDuper! restores the drive just fine, but renamed it to the name of the sparseimage. I had to do a cmd-i on the drive in Finder, and rename it back to Macintosh HD.
Since SuperDuper! excludes the sparseimage from indexing, your restored drive will also be excluded. Just go into Spotlight preferences, and remove the Macintosh HD from the Privacy exclusion list.

So, in conclusion, that nightly backup via SuperDuper! to an external FireWire drive really saved my bacon! Kudos and thanks, Shirt Pocket!

Ricoh Japan - New GXR Firmware v1.29 - Fast AF WOW!

2010-11-01T13:40:00.001+09:00

Ricoh Japan just released the new GXR firmware, version 1.29, on their Japan site, and the autofocus speed is now really, really fast. Everyone who has a Ricoh GXR with A12 50mm module should definitely update right away. Fantastic improvement and thanks Ricoh!

How to Upgrade Ricoh GXR Firmware

Download the firmware and unzip it.
Put the firmware files (several files) onto an SD card and put the card into the camera.
Make sure the camera is off.
Press plus and playback buttons simultaneously for a few seconds until you see the LCD change.
Follow the prompts, OK-ing to install.
Don't mess with the camera while it is updating.

That's it.

Switching Parts of a String in Excel

2010-09-28T10:49:00.001+09:00

I had the need to fix mistakenly entered email addresses in Excel, and luckily the mistake was a recognizable pattern. They should have been firstname.lastname@domain.com but were entered as lastname.firstname@domain.com. This short post explains how I extracted the names and switched them.

How to Swap Parts of an Excel String

First assume you have smith.joe@acme.com in cell A2, and that what you want is joe.smith@acme.com in cell A5. Enter this formula in cell A3:

=LEFT(A2,(FIND(".",A2,1)-1))

That extracts "smith" out of the email address in A2, by using the FIND function to return the number of the position of the period. You subtract 1 to tell LEFT when to stop extracting.

Next, in cell A4, enter this formula:

=MID(A2,(FIND(".",A2,1)+1),((FIND("@",A2,1))-(FIND(".",A2,1)+1)))

That uses MID to extract from one after the period, through one behind the @. This is about finding the positions of parts of the string you can see are in a pattern, and subtracting or adding 1.

Now in A5 you can concatenate the two in the proper order, and add the domain, thusly:

=A4&"."&A3&"@acme.com"

That's it & good luck!

Mama-chari Schrader Valve "Mushi Gomu" Repair

2010-09-05T15:33:00.001+09:00

If you live in Japan or have visited, you will know the ubiquitous "mama chari" (mom bike) from its loud squeaky brakes, and precarious perching of bags and children both, on its front and rear platforms and baskets. My wife's mama-chari rear tire got a flat, and as the resident mechanic around the house, I got to fix it. I tried pumping it up, but that was not working, and noticed that to get the rear wheel off if I had to remove the tube, I would have to disassemble the rear friction brake (the source of all that squealing!).

Yikes, lots of parts. I decided to google removing the rear wheel on a mama-chari, and found an article talking about that topic, but warning readers to make sure the "mushi gomu" was intact, saying this is a common cause for what people think are flats. This mysterious "bug rubber" (虫ゴム) is just a little rubber tube about 1.5 mm diameter and 2 cm long, that you slide over the valve plug. It forms a seal between the metal valve plug and the side of the valve, letting air in during the pumping, but keeping it from flowing out otherwise. But, it makes like a flat if it is oxidized.

If you remove the valve cap, and unscrew / pull out the valve plug from the valve case sticking out of the hole in the rim, you can check whether the rubber is rotted or otherwise broken. Sure enough, when I took a look at ours, it was all rotted and falling off. So I went to my LBS (Local Bike Shop) and asked for "mushi gomu". JPY 150 and we were all fixed in 5 minutes.

Hope this helps other cycling DIYers in Japan.

Convert Line Endings with Aplomb

2010-06-22T16:24:00.001+09:00

When transferring files from system to system, for instance, using csv files to transfer data from one db to another, sometimes there are problems where programs will not process a file because of its line endings. This happens especially if you process a file on one platform, say Mac, and try to use the file on another, say Windows. Even if you have saved a file as CSV from Mac Excel 2008, it will not necessarily be saved in a format that can be read programmatically, if the program is expecting a certain type of line ending.

How Can We Avoid Line Terminator Problems and Troubles?

Let's recall how lines are terminated by default on Windows, Mac and Unix.

Windows-style line endings are CRLF ( \r\n or hex 0D0A )

Mac-style line endings are CR ( \r or hex 0D )

Unix-style line endings are LF ( \n or hex 0A )

There are a number of ready-made command line programs like unix2dos, dos2unix, mac2dos, dos2mac and so on, that can be used to convert line endings. Note that you can also use the tr or perl commands as well. Tr is available on Macs by default and on almost any unix. Perl is pretty ubiquitous as well. E.g:

[root@server /path/to/files]# tr '\r' '\r\n' win-crlf-file.csv

[root@server /path/to/files]# tr '\n' '\r\n' win-crlf-file.csv

[root@server /path/to/files]# perl -pe 's/\r\n|\n|\r/\r\n/g' unix-lf-file.csv > win-crlf-file.csv

If you want to find out whether a file has the expected line terminators, you can use the file command on *nix or Mac. Here's what that looks like:

[root@server /path/to/files]# file inputfile1.csv

inputfile1.csv: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

[root@server /path/to/files]# file inputfile2.csv

inputfile2.csv: ASCII text, with CR line terminators

You can also use the cat command to show line endings, with its -e switch. Do a man cat for more info, because you can also get line numbers, for instance. The first file below has CRLF, which shows up in cat’s output as ^M$, and the second file has only a ^, which is equivalent to the Mac CR line ending only situation. What you need will depend upon the import program.

[root@server /path/to/files]# cat -e inputfile1.csv

Part,Cust,Price,StartDate,EndDate,Reason^M$

123-ABC-456,CUST000001,100,6-01-2010,05-31-2011,Regular Update^M$

456-ABC-789,CUST000001,100,6-01-2010,05-31-2011,Regular Update^M$

…

[root@server /path/to/files]# cat -e inputfile2.csv

Part,Cust,Price,StartDate,EndDate,Reason^123-ABC-456,CUST000001,100,01-06-2010,31-05-2011,Regular Update^

Besides line endings, there is also the text encoding of the file, to watch out for. For instance, is the file saved in Roman or Unicode or some other format? In the end, take care to confirm the file you have output is what is needed by the program for input. Enjoy!

Fixing a Mac OS X Spotlight Index, that Doesn't

2010-06-01T07:31:00.001+09:00

After a spate of Mail.app problems probably related to having too damn many mail accounts and messages, I had to do the "Mail.app Reimport Samba" taking hours to let Mail.app reimport the entire mail store. After that got resolved, I found out that my Mail.app "Entire Message" selection in Search was greyed out. This turned out to be a symptom of a problem with the Spotlight index, since this search function of Mail.app is dependent upon the Spotlight index of the hard drive where your mail is stored. Generally speaking, the Solution was to delete the Spotlight index, and then re-index the drive. However, it was not a simple process (is anything?!), and as such was very "un-Apple", so I thought I would take the time to document it.

How to Make Spotlight Re-index Your Drive, Even When She Says No!

A.k.a., How to Fix Greyed Out "Entire Message" in Mail.app Search. As I was learning to do this procedure in my OS X 10.6.3 system, looking at the Apple forums and elsewhere, I observed that Spotlight was taking "forever" to re-index, while it should re-index a 500GB drive in an hour or so. When I clicked the "pulsating" Spotlight icon in the upper right of the screen (it pulsates or winks while re-indexing), I saw a message that Spotlight was calculating the time required to index the drive with a barber pole progress bar, but it was just stuck in this state for days. This prompted me to try various things to fix it, and no one method from any one forum ever worked for me, in practice.

So, let me try to explain what did work.

Remove the Extraneous

Disconnect any external drives and shut down any unneeded programs.

Remove Unneeded Spotlight Importers

Spotlight importers which allow programs to get their output files indexed are sometimes the cause of Spotlight crashes. You can find them in /Library/Spotlight and ~/Library/Spotlight (where ~ is your home directory, of course). If you have third-party importers, especially in ~/Library/Spotlight, you can move them to another folder for safekeeping, then move them back one by one to see if the "indexing forever" problem recurs. I deleted ones that were associated with programs I never use, but kept the ones I do use.

You can search the entire drive for the .mdimporter files, using this command. Hat tip to "Hal Itosis" (lol) on the MacFixit Forum.

# find -x / -iname \*.mdimporter -exec ls -lndotT {} +

Repair Disk Permissions

I use the excellent Cocktail for this but you can do it in 3rd Party OnyX or Apple's included Disk Utility as well. In Cocktail, use the Disks menu, Permissions tab. Choose to Reset Permissions and ACLs for Home Directories for All Users, then click Repair. This takes about 30 mins to execute.

Prepare the Index

Using Terminal, use launchctl to unload the indexer by controlling the appropriate launchd command, use mdutil to turn off indexing for the root folder (the /) of the local hard drive, use rm to delete the index itself (.Spotlight-V100 in the root of the drive), and finally trash Spotlight's plist.

$ sudo bash

Password: *******

# launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

# mdutil -i off -E /

# cd /

# rm -rf .Spotlight-V100

# rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist

# exit

$

To explain, note the sudo bash and exit lines, bookending the procedure. This gets you a root prompt (the #) after you enter the admin password and then exits the root prompt at the end (returning to the $ prompt). You can also use sudo before every command, to be extra safe.

Clear All Caches

Noting that this part will force a reboot, again in Cocktail Files, Caches, choose Options and select all caches you can. Executing this resets the system to a state close to what you get when you install anew or do a major upgrade. Note that the system will take longer to restart because it is rebuilding caches, and applications will be sluggish the first time they restart, because they are rebuilding font caches.

Click Clear to execute the cleaning procedure and wait while it finishes. Choose to let the system restart, but when you hear the startup chime, hold down Shift so the system restarts in Safe Mode.

Safe Mode Index Rebuild

The system will take a while to get into Safe Mode. After you press and hold Shift while starting up, once you see the progress bar during startup (which is not present in normal mode), you can let go of Shift and go get coffee while it starts up. The login prompt will have a red Safe Mode in it, to alert you to the difference.

Again in Terminal, issue some commands to rebuild.

$ sudo bash

Password: *******

# launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

# mdutil -i on -E /

/:

Indexing enabled.

# exit

$

After a few minutes you should see the Spotlight icon start to pulsate, but this time, the "Calculating Indexing Time" should change to some value, and a blue progress bar, which means the indexing is actually working. You can restart into regular mode, and the indexing just picked up where it left off, for me. However, do not connect any additional drives until it is done indexing the main drive.

Observing and Confirming

There are a few things you can do to observe and confirm Spotlight's activities, in Terminal. This assumes you are at a root prompt.

Check the size of the Spotlight index using du (directory usage):

# du -hsc /.Spot*

1.1G /.Spotlight-V100

1.1G total

Note that this should be a fairly large file. If it is only a megabyte or so, something is broken or your Spotlight index is off.

Check Spotlight-related processes with ps (process lister):

# ps axcru |sed '1p;/ md/!d'

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND

root 352 0.0 2.8 3696728 117196 ?? Ss 8:44AM 24:25.73 mds

_spotlight 6677 0.0 0.2 2532748 10292 ?? SNs 3:19AM 0:00.33 mdworker

rcogley 6664 0.0 1.2 2638620 48240 ?? SNs 3:19AM 0:02.95 mdworker

Check index status with mdutil.

# mdutil -as

/:

Indexing enabled.

/Volumes/COGLEY-WD:

Indexing enabled.

/Volumes/COGLEY-WD/Backups.backupdb:

Indexing enabled.

/Volumes/COGLEY-WD2:

Indexing enabled.

/Volumes/COGLEY:

Indexing enabled.

List open files in /System/Library related to Spotlight, using lsof (list open files).

# lsof -c md |grep -v /System/Library |grep -v Spotlight

Get general system information with df and diskutil:

# df -lh

# diskutil info /

Show commands you have entered in the bash shell:

# history

Note that if you use an alternative shell like fish, some of the above commands will not work. From fish, just do sudo bash to get a bash-based root prompt. Be sure also to check the Console GUI application in /Applications/Utilities. This will show crash information for the mdworker program, which may give you hints to what is going on.

I hope this article helps someone, especially since this problem seems to be pretty prevalent, these days. Enjoy!

Apology accepted, Zendesk. Thank you.

2010-05-21T07:40:00.001+09:00

In the wake of the Zendesk Price Fiasco of 19 May 2010, in which SaaS helpdesk vendor Zendesk announced pricing hikes which negatively affected most of their users (and would have caused a doubling for us), and after which an angry firestorm erupted, Zendesk users received an email apology from CEO Mikkel Svane today, and more information in his blog post.

I have a bit of a bitter taste in my mouth after having been treated that way, but let's let bygones be bygones. I very much appreciate the real grandfathering they have extended to existing customers.

So, apology accepted, Zendesk, and kudos to you Mikkel for doing the right thing. I am sure it was difficult.

SaaS Helpdesk Software that Supports Japanese

2010-05-20T07:08:00.001+09:00

After the Zendesk Price Fiasco of 19 May 2010, where Zendesk are proposing to significantly raise prices for their SaaS helpdesk solution, I am confident many users are looking elsewhere. This is one of the pitfalls of a SaaS solution, wherein the provider achieves external investment, and subsequently bows to pressure from said investors to raise prices or otherwise change a model that was working. At least for we users.

In our case, the cost of Zendesk, while was higher than others, was justified because it somewhat supported the Japanese mails my firm gets. I say somewhat because certain mails would cause Zendesk to have a fit, but that is mostly calmed down now.

That being said, now that Zendesk has basically doubled their prices for us and while I have made no decisions on whether to accept their "offer" of prepaying annually to lock in the current pricing for one year, I thought I would list alternatives and whether they support Japanese.

It is important to note, that there are several aspects to "supporting Japanese" some of which include:

User Interface

Ability to Email in and out of the Helpdesk

Ability to search

Ability to store Japanese data

Many web based products, and not just Helpdesk products, face these challenges when localizing to multi-byte character sets. User Interface is straightforward, as is the ability to store the data. These are kind of "level 1" localizations. Searching is harder, because of the space-less nature of Japanese, and emailing in and out is a major pain. Often, they get the email body correct, and you can see Japanese in it, but, the subject line is munged. It is a complex undertaking, especially for non-native speakers. So, caveat emptor.

List of Helpdesk Software that Supports Japanese

Confirmed Positive:

Zendesk themselves. Most Japanese mail is processed correctly but there are some glitches occasionally. We have personally confirmed all the above-mentioned aspects of Zendesk.

Kayako's Savin Behal replied to me in an email: Our software supports multiple languages. You may download the required (Japanese) language packs from the Kayako Forums at “http://forums.kayako.com/f50/”. These language packs have been shared by our clients. However, we regret to inform you that we do not support these packs officially.

Active Campaign supports Japanese fully, according to Jason in the comments on this post.

Web Helpdesk says they do indeed support Japanese email. From Shiraz Hemani, Business Development Manager: "Per your questions on email, yes Web Help Desk fully supports monitoring of any number of incoming mail accounts in all language character sets, including Japanese. Each incoming account can be associated with any number of outgoing mail accounts as well. We have more info available for that feature at:

http://www.webhelpdesk.com/trouble-ticket-software/convert-email-to-ticket.html"

Atlassian Jira does support Japanese. We had been using it in Japan, but moved away from it due to the glacial pace of development of certain security-related enterprise features we needed.

Confirmed Negative:

Tender says they do not support Japanese. Will says: "... I'm sorry, but we don't currently have international language support in Tender. We do hope to add the feature in the near future, but it's not ready at this time."

Unconfirmed:

http://www.cerberusweb.com/

http://www.thevisionworld.com/

http://www.autotask.com/software/service_desk.htm

Please comment if you have more or better information.

Updates

21 May 2010 - Zendesk has since recanted, apologized, and offered real grandfathered terms for existing customers. I have to say I have a bitter taste in my mouth, but, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the difficulty of changing systems. We'll sit a spell.

How not to run a SaaS: Zendesk

2010-05-19T08:16:00.001+09:00

I got an email from Zendesk in the middle of the night and this blog post, breathlessly announcing "new features!" and along with that, new pricing. I and many other users could probably have dealt with an x% increase, but a doubling? It was even worse for people on other plans, as well, and that means a lot of upset users. CEO Mikkel Svane's patronizing attitude is not helping matters either (see the screen shot of his arrogant tweet in this post).

Down to brass tacks: we have 8 agents on the Plus+ plan and are paying the equivalent of 27 USD / agent per month. The new announced pricing puts it at 59 USD / agent per month. Users are being given an "opportunity" to lock their existing pricing in, by paying annually for a 15% discount, and it appears that the limit to this is one year. So, we take the hit up front by paying up front, and we take another hit later anyway. Sounds like a plan, Zendesk.

This is a one-sided, sneaky and very much not transparent decision on pricing by Zendesk, which I suspect is being driven by chop-licking investors. Who can trust Zendesk now that they have shown how they will treat customers. If we take the offer being dangled, who knows what will happen after their next round of investment.

Unacceptable way to run any business, and a slap in the face. I hope Zendesk will respond in a positive way, instead of burying their collective head under the sand.

Updates

20 May 2010 - no proper response from Zendesk as of this AM. Zendesk users still angrily commenting (of course). 21 May 2010 - an email in from Mikkel Svane, Zendesk CEO, recanted and apologized for the mistake, as well as grandfathering existing customer prices in forever. That was nice of him, and appreciated.

Voigtländer Color-Skopar 20mm Lens Cap Problem

2010-05-15T09:15:00.001+09:00

The lens cap that comes supplied with the Voigtländer Color-Skopar 20mm SL II does not fit, when you have the LH-20 lens hood and a filter on. What a dumb design oversight. However, if you get a Nikon LC-52 52mm lens cap, that fits right in there, no problem. Nice.

I like the design of the Nikon caps better than the Cosina Voigtländer or Carl Zeiss ones anyway. Easy to grab and avoid getting my paw prints all over the lens.

I hope this helps any owners of the tiny high-performance Voigtländer Color-Skopar 20mm SL II. Enjoy!

Memo: the real "Rick R. Colgey" is Rick Cogley, Eurobiz

2010-05-15T06:52:00.001+09:00

I just noticed that Eurobiz Japan inanely published my article on Interim IT Management Services in their May 2010 issue under the name "Rick R. Colgey". They took the time to painstakingly "correct" my American spelling during proofreading, then got my name wildly incorrect in the article. Thanks a bunch, folks.

So, if you are looking for "Rick R. Colgey" of eSolia and not finding him, that would be me. Please see the contacts below.

Rick Cogley

CEO, eSolia Inc.

http://rick.cogley.info

http://www.esolia.com

Sincerely,

Got Mojibake in Mail.app? Here's a Cure.

2010-04-14T16:09:00.001+09:00

If you use OS X Mail to send Japanese email, you may find that some recipients complain that your Japanese is "mojibake" or garbled. If you are getting this feedback you can set your default Character Set encoding in the terminal.

How to Set Mail.app's Default Charset

Here's how to change it. Shut down mail, then in Terminal:

$ defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset "ISO-2022-JP"

That will set Mail's default character set to ISO-2022-JP instead of UTF-8, and after you restart Mail.app, you will be golden. I tested this in Mail.app 4.2 in OS X 10.6.3 and it works for me (at least according to my Outlook-saddled colleagues).

Enjoy!

Opening a Tab-Delimited "CSV" in Apple iWork Numbers

2010-03-16T15:12:00.001+09:00

I like Numbers, from Apple's competent and beautiful iWork suite, but there are still things where it is different from Microsoft Excel, and hence it feels somewhat unfamiliar at times. For example, although Excel has never been good at handling text files saved in UTF-8 format (a big deal for those of us who work in Asia), it does have a nice Wizard for importing CSV or TSV text files.

Some applications export text files with tab-separated values, and put a CSV extension on them. Actually, CSV stands for "Comma Separated Values" where these are really "TSV" or "Tab Separated Values." When you try to import such a CSV file, Numbers will mash all the fields into one cell in the left-most column. That makes sense, because it's looking for commas judging by the CSV extension. Finding none, it just lets the data pile on.

How to Import a Tab-Separated "CSV" in Numbers

If you have a tab-separated CSV, here's how to open it:

Save the file somewhere you can find it.

Rename the file in Finder, so that it has a .TXT extension.

Ctrl-click the file and choose "Open With" and "Numbers".

Now the data will open correctly, with each field getting its due, and you'll get the added benefit of Numbers not munging any Japanese or Chinese characters.

Hope this tip helps someone. Enjoy!

Fixing an Unexpected Prompt Hostname in OS X

2010-02-23T15:07:00.001+09:00

In Mac OS X, you may have noticed if you use the Terminal that OS X automatically picks up what it thinks your hostname should be and sets it. This is nice, but the problem with it is if any utility uses your hostname to set config files, you'll have a different config file every time.

How to fix a "Strange Hostname" in an OS X Prompt

If you are getting varied prompts that look like this...:

rcogley@em60-123-194-6 ~>

...where what you're expecting is something like this:

rcogley@rickmac ~>

To fix this, you can use scutil. Here's how I did it:

scutil --set HostName "rickmac.esolia.net"

Substitute the rickmac bit with your own hostname and domain and you'll be good to go with a static prompt. Try these also:

scutil --get HostName

scutil --get LocalHostName

scutil --get ComputerName

man scutil

I hope this helps someone. Enjoy!

Aperture 3 Upgrade Observations

2010-02-15T08:42:00.001+09:00

My upgrade to Apple's Aperture 3 came over the weekend so I upgraded and started letting it analyze faces using the iPhoto-inspired "Faces and Places" feature.

Here's a few observations from the upgrade process and just a little use of the Faces feature.

Aperture 3's icons are colorful, compared to its predecessor. I think they still look professional, but they are a little "friendlier" and more iPhoto-like.

Aperture 3 itself is just under 1GB in size but the sample library is about 7GB.

To use the new features of Aperture 3, you must upgrade your Aperture 2 library. This can take several hours and did for me on a 50GB library.

Backup "Vaults" seem to also require a full refresh, probably due to the library upgrade. Vault backups still run in that irritating modal dialog box that pops up and interrupts. Best to freshen Vaults when you don't have to work on anything else, but I still love the ability to have multiple Vaults. Note, Vaults are freshened in serial - it seems to do one, then do the next.

Both TimeMachine and Spotlight indexing get kicked into overdrive because they detect upgraded files from the Aperture 3 upgrade activities.

With the new Faces feature, you have to train Aperture 3 to use it. If you pick a folder of photos in your library with people you commonly photograph, and spend the time to tell Aperture who is who, you can then use the "Confirm Faces" feature to drag-select vast swaths of matching faces, or, to toggle a face to be "not Jim" or "not Jane". It works better the more you train it, and it's fun to see who it "thinks" you are. Family resemblances can be telling :-). Faces also links to Address Book entries.

Aperture 3 is most definitely snappier compared to its previous version, and registers in Activity Monitor as Intel 64-bit. My library uses about 250MB of memory.

I think it's a worthwhile upgrade just for the speed increase.

Set MBR Correctly to Backup Successfully with OS X Time Machine

2010-02-12T09:40:00.001+09:00

If you use Time Machine on OS X, you need to ensure your target drive is formatted with the correct Master Boot Record type. Time Machine requires either "Apple Partition Map" (works with PowerPC or Intel but is best for PowerPC) or "GUID Partition Table" (works with Intel).

There are a couple of problems which lead to this requirement biting people on the you-know-where.

Pre-formatted drives that will work with a Mac are not often formatted with "Apple Partition Map", but will be recognized by your Mac, lulling you into a false sense of success and security.

Time Machine rudely does not warn you that your drive has a problem. It will happily back up for a while, then fail with some not-so-useful error.

Re-formatting a drive in the normal way using "Erase" in Disk Utility will just erase the content and not re-do the partition map.

So, when prepping a drive for Time Machine use, you need to use the "Options" button to set the Partition Map.

Formatting a Drive for Time Machine Use

Here's how to set it up.

In Disk Utility, select your new hard drive (the drive, not the partitions below it in the selection tree).

Select the Parition tab, which you can see in the accompanying graphic, and choose the number of volumes from the "Volume Scheme" pop-up menu.

Click "Options", then choose "GUID Partition Table" for an Intel-based Mac or "Apple Partition Map" for PowerPC- or Intel-based Macs. Then click "OK" and "Apply".

I hope this helps someone avoid the trouble I had getting Time Machine working smoothly. Enjoy!

Fixing Slow Snow Leopard Mail

2010-02-05T12:56:00.001+09:00

Many upgrading Mac users have reported that Mail is "slow" in Snow Leopard 10.6. There are several things you can do to remedy the situation. Here's what you can try, but please make sure you have Time Machine backing up your system, or are running an alternative like SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner.

Reset SMTP Mail

One thing that sharp users observed on Apple's forums was that newly-created Mail accounts were not experiencing the slowness to send, that upgraders were commonly experiencing. You can export your mail, recreate your accounts and re-import everything, but another way to mimic creating a new account is to re-set SMTP credentials. It's a bit voodoo, but it seems to work.

In Mail app open Preferences, choose the Account you are having trouble with, and then choose "Edit SMTP Server List" from the "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)" drop down, in the Account Information panel.

Select the SMTP server you are using, and re-enter its credentials.

Click OK to Save.

Do this for all your SMTP servers, and remember you can always use Keychain Access to confirm saved passwords.

Vacuum That Index

Mail keeps an index of your messages in a sqlite database, and you can "vacuum" that index regularly to compact and clean up. This is especially useful if you regularly delete mail, and is well-documented on various Mac-related web sites. Quit mail, then from Terminal, run these commands.


yourhost:~ youruser$ ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index 
yourhost:~ youruser$ /usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;
yourhost:~ youruser$ ls -lah ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index

The bookend "ls" commands just show how large your Envelope Index is in megabytes, so you can see the before and after, when running the vacuum command. The middle sqlite3 command vacuums the index. For reference, recently vacuuming my mail envelope index required about 10 minutes, but reduced its size from about 70MB to about 40MB.

Run Cocktail

And finally for general performance, you should regularly run Cocktail. From Maintain's site:

Cocktail is an award winning general purpose utility for Mac OS X. It is a smooth and powerful digital toolset with a variety of practical features that simplifies the use of advanced UNIX functions and helps Mac users around the world to get the most out of their computers. Cocktail is installed at more than 200 000 computers world wide. The largest part being private individuals, but Cocktail can also be found at large international companies (Puma, Sony), educational institutions (Harvard University, University of Texas) or newspapers (The New York Times, Business Week).

The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail's major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

Cocktail's Pilot is where you can schedule commands to run. I do a weekly Cocktail run, to reset disk permissions and delete caches. It seems to keep things running smooth, but you should note that for certain system cache resets, you should restart the system afterwards.

At any rate, I hope the above information helps someone out. Enjoy!

Fixing Aperture Vault Errors from Terminal

2010-01-24T15:23:00.001+09:00

Apple's pro photo management application Aperture 2 is long overdue for an upgrade, and I hope that we'll see Aperture version 3 before long. But while I'm itching for new features and functions, Aperture 2 covers the bases for me, in spades. Aperture has a nice feature called Vaults, which lets you automatically back up your photo library with all metadata to an external drive or drives. Except when it doesn't. For whatever reason, I was having trouble saving to one of my vaults saved on an older external FireWire hard drive, and it was returning errors about not being able to create folders or write files. This sounded like a permissions problem, so I looked into it.

An Aperture vault is a "package" file in OS X, which means the file is a collection of folders and files, which appear in the Finder as a single file. The original Aperture library, the iTunes and iPhoto libraries, and files from applications like Keynote or Pages are like this. Note I'm using OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2, but these instructions should work on Tiger or Leopard as well. Here's how I dealt with the error.

How to Refresh Permissions on your Aperture Vault

The first thing is to shut down Aperture. Since Aperture grabs the Vault file and holds it open, it might be locked. Looking at the MyVault.apvault file in Finder, I can see it's locked by doing cmd-I and digging around in the information panel.

Recursively unlock. Because you need unlocked files to perform permission settings, you can start by recursively unlocking a folder, like this. Use sudo if you are not logged or su'ed in as root (run "sudo bash" to do this but be careful), and you can unlock files in an entire volume by cd-ing to /Volumes first if need be. Of course you can do this in the Finder's information panel as well.

chflags -R nouchg /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

Set POSIX owner and group. Comparing to a working Aperture Vault, the basic permissions were your usual user account, and "staff" as the group. Change the owner to your account with the group as staff. The -R makes it recursive even inside the vault package file.

chown -R rcogley:staff /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

Set POSIX basic perms. After setting the owner and group, I set the vault's permissions to 777.

chmod -R 777 /path/to/folder/MyVault.apvault

After that, I re-opened Aperture, refreshed the Vaults, and it worked without a hitch. I hope this hint helps someone. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2010-01-18T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Handle Leading Zeros in Apple Numbers
Apple's iWork '09 Numbers spreadsheet is a versatile app with a lot of power available if you open your mind and don't expect it to be Excel. It does not quite do everything Excel does, but it handles UTF-8 well (where Excel does not and has never), and I take advantage of that often. I also love the formatting options and the multiple-sheets-per-document paradigm, but that is a different post. One challenge in both Excel and Numbers is how to handle fields with numbers with leading zeros. For instance, a part number 001234 will come out as 1234 when you import it from a CSV in either app, and lose meaning if the actual part must include the leading zeros. You can set a cell or column format in Excel as 000000, and this works the same way in Numbers, except the method's a little unfamiliar. How to Format a Part Number Field to Preserve Leading Zeros
tags: apple, iwork, numbers, zeros, text, format

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Handle Leading Zeros in iWork Numbers

2010-01-15T22:05:00.001+09:00

Apple's iWork '09 Numbers spreadsheet is a versatile app with a lot of power available if you open your mind and don't expect it to be Excel. It does not quite do everything Excel does, but it handles UTF-8 well (where Excel does not and has never), and I take advantage of that often. I also love the formatting options and the multiple-sheets-per-document paradigm, but that is a different post.

One challenge in both Excel and Numbers is how to handle fields with numbers with leading zeros. For instance, a part number 001234 will come out as 1234 when you import it from a CSV in either app, and lose meaning if the actual part must include the leading zeros. You can set a cell or column format in Excel as 000000, and this works the same way in Numbers, except the method's a little unfamiliar.

How to Format a Part Number Field to Preserve Leading Zeros

Here's how to not maim your part numbers.

Select your column to format, and open the Cells inspector.

Select Custom Format from Cell Format then click Show Format.

Give the format a name, and choose the base type.

Delete whatever format is in there by default and drag up an Integers type lozenge.

Open the disclosure triangle, and choose "Show Zeros for Unused Digits" and you will see the #,### change to 0,000. Click Show Separator to deselect it and remove the comma. Add two digits.

Click OK to save and apply the format to the selected column.

If you set the format as 000000 for a field that includes six digit numerics with leading zeros, and a mix of text with numeric part numbers, such as:

001234

P098765

005544

R-09-PCX

... the latter will not be affected by the format, which is just the right behavior we need.

I hope this tip helps someone, because not being able to set this really drove me a bit batty. Enjoy!

CocoaTech's Path Finder - Versatile Encoding Helper

2009-12-16T17:59:00.001+09:00

CocoaTech's Path Finder tool is a versatile Finder replacement. One problem that you might have if you do any work with data, is importing CSV files that are in the UTF-8 format, and which contain multi-byte characters such as Japanese, into Excel.

To import a UTF-8 CSV into Excel, you need to re-save into a format that Excel will accept, because it ironically does not accept the quite-universal UTF-8. I tried opening my UTF-8 CSV with TextMate and Text Edit to do the re-save into a different encoding, but neither of those allow me to save to Shift JIS, which renders Japanese characters so Excel can import them properly.

I saw that Path Finder has a native Text Editor, and thought I would try it. Sure enough, it allows you to re-save a file in Shift JIS and with a TXT extension, which can then easily be imported into Excel, unmunged.

Thanks CocoaTech!

Greylisting in Snow Leopard Server, or not

2009-10-30T13:19:00.001+09:00

Apple's OS X Snow Leopard Server 10.6 implements Greylisting, an anti-spam technique based on forcing sending SMTP servers to "slow down" before they can deliver. This is great for reducing spam, but it also has the perhaps undesired effect of causing delivery delays. Sometimes really, really loooong delivery delays.

In SLS, when you enable anti-spam in your Mail server (which is postfix), greylisting is automatically enabled. Because there are no readily available manuals on how to use this feature, from Apple, you may want to turn it off. Note that I'm skittish about changing config files like in a normal Unix server in an Apple server, because Apple is known to simply change vast portions of their server products without much notice. It's possible that you'd spend time implementing, and they change the way it has to be done so you have to redo it. Anyway, here's how to disable:

How to Disable Greylisting in Snow Leopard Server

Of course, as implied above, you can stop Greylisting by turning off spam filtering altogether. However, to be more specific and just disable Greylisting, do the following:

From Terminal on the server (ssh'ed in or direct), do "sudo bash" to login as root. Then use nano to edit /etc/postfix/main.cf

Remove the "check_policy_service unix:private/policy" string from the line that starts with "smtpd_recipient_restrictions" near the bottom of the file. Save, and exit nano.

Issue a "postfix reload" to reload the configuration.

Use the "exit" command to quit the sudo bash root shell.

I'm a little miffed that Apple would enable this by default and not implement any easy way to edit the greylists or whitelists. At any rate, you can read a couple articles on greylisting, or just wait for Apple. Time however, waits for no man. :-)

Textmate Regular Expression Search and Replace

2009-10-30T12:30:00.001+09:00

I use and love the text editor Textmate, which has some powerful functions. One thing that it can help with is quickly editing text files, and for example today I used it for searching lines in a mail system's "aliases" file. I wanted to remove 50-odd lines with the word owner in them, so I used the Find command with Regular Expression checked.

The search string is:

^.*owner.*$

If you enter that string which means to find the lines with owner in them, check "Regular Expression," and leave a blank in the Replace box, Textmate will blank out the lines for you. Convenient!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-10-19T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Recovery of Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory
Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory Services Thu, Oct 15 2009 22:24 | LDAP, Open Directory, tips, software, Troubleshooting, apple | Permalink I had a Leopard Server crash and burn so that nothing was responding, and when I forced the server to reboot (as well as rebooting a bunch of other ancillary servers and services just in case), I found an ominous sign in Server Admin, along with no user accounts in Workgroup Manager. Eek! Server Admin's Open Directory showed:
tags: open, directory, apple, leopard, server, recover, crash

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Corrupt Apple Leopard Server Open Directory Services

2009-10-15T22:24:00.001+09:00

I had a Leopard Server crash and burn so that nothing was responding, and when I forced the server to reboot (as well as rebooting a bunch of other ancillary servers and services just in case), I found an ominous sign in Server Admin, along with no user accounts in Workgroup Manager. Eek! Server Admin's Open Directory showed:

LDAP Server is: stopped

Password Server is: running

Kerberos is: stopped

Not good. Never fear, though.

How to Fix a Corrupted Open Directory

First, don't panic. Apple's forums show you can use "

slapd -Tt

" to check the configuration.

myhost:~ administrator$ sudo bash

Password: ********

bash-3.2# /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

bdb(dc=myhost,dc=mydomain,dc=com): PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery

bdb_db_open: Database cannot be opened, err -30978. Restore from backup!

bdb(dc=myhost,dc=mydomain,dc=com): DB_ENV->lock_id_free interface requires /

an environment configured for the locking subsystem

backend_startup_one: bi_db_open failed! (-30978)

slap_startup failed (test would succeed using the -u switch)

The "run recovery" here means to run the

db_recover

command (a.k.a.

slapd_db_recover

on other *nix LDAPs). Use the -v switch to make the result verbose.

bash-3.2# db_recover-v -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-

openldap-data/ openldap-slurp/

bash-3.2# db_recover -v -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-data/

db_recover: Finding last valid log LSN: file: 6 offset 4190936

db_recover: Recovery starting from [6][4190795]

db_recover: Recovery complete at Thu Oct 15 21:57:41 2009

db_recover: Maximum transaction ID 80000225 Recovery checkpoint [6][4190936]

Ah, that looked nice. Then run

slapd -Tt

again to test, and if all is well, exit out of the sudo'ed bash shell.

bash-3.2# /usr/libexec/slapd -Tt

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

overlay_config(): warning, overlay "dynid" already in list

config file testing succeeded

bash-3.2# exit

myhost:~ administrator$

After a few minutes

launchd

should kickstart the Open Directory services again so that you see:

LDAP Server is: running

Password Server is: running

Kerberos is: running

A couple of tests shows I once again have Wiki Server, iCal Server, Jabber Chat etc, all the Open Directory and Kerberos-based services back on line. Breathe a sigh of relief if this helped you and let me know in the comments!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-09-14T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Linking File Types and Apps in OS X
How to Re-associate File Types with Applications in OS X - If you are an OS X user, and you find files of a certain type, say PDFs, are opening in one applications but you want them to open in a different one, you can easily change the association using Finder.
tags: os, x, apps, association, file, type, tiger, leopard, snow

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Linking File Types and Apps in OS X

2009-09-13T11:09:00.001+09:00

If you are an OS X user, and you find files of a certain type, say PDFs, are opening in one applications but you want them to open in a different one, you can easily change the association using Finder.

How to Re-associate File Types with Applications in OS X

Here's how:

Select a file in Finder and ctrl-click it.

Select "get info" from the context menu.

Find the "open with" section in the "get info" menu that appears.

Select your desired application from the drop down list.

Click "change all" to set the association between that file type and the application you selected.

This has worked in OS X Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard. You can use this method to, say, open all PDFs in the native OS X "Preview", Adobe's Acrobat, or Skim, for instance. Please leave a comment if this helped you. Enjoy!

Safari Makes it Trivial to Download All Images on a Page

2009-09-11T12:35:00.001+09:00

Of course it should not be used for nefarious purposes, but Apple's Safari browser makes it trivial to download all the images or files on a web page you are visiting. I had The Logo Factory create a special logo for my company eSolia's 10th anniversary, and they prepared a page with the deliverables on it. I did not want to download each one individually, and I remembered that the Safari Activities window allows you to access the objects on a page directly, such as various file attachments on a page.

O' Sensei of Safari, How Do We Achieve this Magic?

You can use Safari's Activity and Downloads windows, both available in the Window menu in Safari, in this way:

Browse the page you want to download from, then open Activity from the Window menu.

Find the page among the other pages if you have multiple tabs open. Use the disclosure triangle to open the outline of the objects on the page.

Find and select your download targets. Press Cmd-C to copy to clipboard.

Display the Downloads dialog, also available in the Window menu, then paste into it. Cmd-v.

You should see the images or files start to download in the Downloads window. I hope this is helpful to someone.

Directory Utility MIA in Snow Leopard?

2009-09-09T09:57:00.001+09:00

Is Directory Utility, which has been available in /Applications/Utilities, missing in action in Snow Leopard? No, it's just been moved to Core Services. Access it this way:

Open Apple Menu, System Preferences.

Enter Accounts, clicking the lock to authenticate as needed.

Click Login Options at the bottom of the accounts list.

Click Edit, to the right of "Network Account Server."

Click Open Directory Utility.

You use Directory Utility to connect to Active Directory, Open Directory, or other LDAP servers.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-09-07T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Changing a Bike Inner-tube
I got a flat the last hill of my 100 km bike trip last Sunday. Thank heavens it did not happen at km 50 or something. I went to a bike shop in Shinjuku today to get a replacement tube, and they were kind enough to tutor me on how to replace it. How to Change that Tube Here's the process I learned at the bike shop: Purchase a tube, tire levers (they come in sets of three, usually) and rim tape of the appropriate size. My rims are 26 inch with 1.5 Schwalbe Marathons on them now, and you just have to be sure what you buy is the right size. If you can give them the rim size, that's better too. The tubes come with various valves, and I have "French" valves now so that is what I got. All told, the cost to buy the parts was about JPY 1300 (USD 13).
tags: bike, cycling, inner-tube, change, rim, tape, spoke
blog:Cogley - Fixing EMobile USB Dialup on Snow Leopard
I just installed Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 with no problems after getting a replacement for a bad Family Pack install disk (the Shibuya Apple Store said that many people reported the same), and found that my EMobile Huawei D02HW USB Wireless Dialup card, which was fine in Leopard, died when Snow Leopard was installed. Reinstalling the EMobile Huawei D02HW on Snow Leopard Here's how I fixed it:...
tags: emobile, d02hw, apple, snow, leopard, huawei

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Changing a Bike Tire Inner-tube

2009-09-01T13:37:00.001+09:00

I got a flat the last hill of my 100 km bike trip last Sunday. Thank heavens it did not happen at km 50 or something. I went to a bike shop in Shinjuku today to get a replacement tube, and they were kind enough to tutor me on how to replace it.

How to Change that Tube

Here's the process I learned at the bike shop:

Purchase a tube, tire levers (they come in sets of three, usually) and rim tape of the appropriate size. My rims are 26 inch with 1.5 Schwalbe Marathons on them now, and you just have to be sure what you buy is the right size. If you can give them the rim size, that's better too. The tubes come with various valves, and I have "French" valves now so that is what I got. All told, the cost to buy the parts was about JPY 1300 (USD 13).

Remove the wheel with the flat from the bike. I have Shimano Deore XT rim brakes, and there's a place you hook the brake wire's flange in, which if released, gives you the leeway to get the tire off.

If you have French valves, completely remove the bolt that keeps the valve in place in the rim.

On the opposite side of the wheel from the valve, insert a tire lever between the rim and the tire, and use it to lever the tire out, in that area. Take care not to pinch the tube while you do it, just in case you want to fix and reuse it. You'll notice there's a kind of hook on the one end of the lever - this goes onto a spoke to keep the lever in place, holding the tire edge out and away from the rim.

A couple of spokes away, do the same thing again with the second lever, to get more of the tire out.

Now you should be able to slide the third lever under the edge of the tire, and rotate it along the rim and tire edge to get the tire out. You can keep the one edge of the tire in the rim.

Slide the flatted inner tube out, taking care not to damage it if you want to repair it.

Inspect the tire inside and out for damage. There could be something sharp embedded in the tire. Remove any sharp objects puncturing the tire. In my case there were two pieces of a broken spoke embedded in the tire and in the rim tape. I could only find the one embedded in the tire by running my hand along the inside. The rim tape problem was quite obvious!

If you either remove the tire completely or just push it to one side, you should be able to see the rim tape, which prevents the inflated tube from working its way into the nipple bolts for the spokes. Rim tape prevents flats, but, in time it gets worn out too. If it has been mashed into the nipple bolts too much, and there are sharp edges, replace it. Rim tape is basically like a big rubber band with a hole for the valve. You can use a flat blade driver or an awl to work old rim tape out, and to lever new rim tape on. In my case, the yellow rim tape was two years old and starting to get dry, and, it had been punctured by the old spoke bit, so I replaced it.

Put a little air into your new tube, because it is easier to work with the tube if it is slightly inflated.

Insert the valve through the rim tape and rim, and put the valve bolt on to secure it.

To put the tire back, this time start on the valve side (removal starts opposite the valve). You can use the tire levers to get started putting the tire back into the rim, but be careful not to pinch the new tube. Having the tube slightly inflated will make things a little easier to maneuver. Once you get the tire in a little, use your hands to kind of "knead" the tire back in, working around it. Schwalbe Marathons are a little tough, as they have Kevlar inside and are consequently a bit harder rubber.

Check that the valve is 90 degrees to the rim. If it is angled, work the tire and rim until you can rotate it so it is perpendicular to the rim.

Inflate the tube to the correct psi pressure. Confirm that it's holding air and that you have not damaged the tube.

Deflate the tube once, then re-inflate. The bike shop said this last step really helps to prevent flats.

Go ride!

Hope this procedure helps someone with their tube troubles. Happy riding!

Fixing EMobile USB Dialup on Snow Leopard

2009-09-01T00:32:00.001+09:00

I just installed Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 with no problems after getting a replacement for a bad Family Pack install disk (the Shibuya Apple Store said that many people reported the same), and found that my EMobile Huawei D02HW USB Wireless Dialup card, which was fine in Leopard, died when Snow Leopard was installed.

Reinstalling the EMobile Huawei D02HW on Snow Leopard

Here's how I fixed it:

Deleted /Applications/EMobile D02HW Utility.app.

Deleted /System/Library/Extensions/HuaweiDataCardDriver.kext

Deleted Huawei folders and files in /System/Library/Modem Scripts and in /Library/Modem Scripts

Emptied the Finder trash.

Rebooted the system.

On plugging in the USB Modem, the system mounts it in Finder as a USB memory. Ran the installer EMobile D02HW Utility.app and got an error regarding AutoOpen. Bypassed this by opening the installer package via "Show Package Contents" in Finder, and ran the Contents/Resources/EMOBILE_D02HW_Drv_App.pkg, which is the actual installer. Now it runs with no errors. AutoOpen be damned.

After the install, rebooted again.

After the reboot, I can add the Huawei Mobile modem in Network Preferences. Phone number for these devices is "*99***1#", user name em, password em.

I read a report that you can simply change tone to pulse dialing in the existing Huawei Mobile settings (from Leopard, for instance), so maybe the failure just has something to do with a plist not working somewhere and changing that setting refreshes it, but removing and reinstalling works fine too.

Give it a try if you have trouble, and I hope this short tip is helpful for someone.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-08-24T01:30:00.001+09:00

Snap!Japan - Japan Rail is becoming more Gaijin
I noticed something interesting. The JR East Japan announcements about the next station are done in a female voice, and she used to say the station names with proper Japanese pronunciation. The next station is, SHIMbashi. They've re-recorded some of the announcements though, seemingly with the same "voice talent", and there's a subtle difference. She now says the station names with a "gaijin" accent. The next station is, shimBOSSshi. What's up with that? Were people not getting the names right? Did some consultant trying to justify their existence tell JR that they needed to say it more like "gaijin" say it? I'd say that would be gaijin of the American English speaking variety, though. How curious. I noticed it the other day, and today it was the original way, so I am not sure what the pattern is yet. Maybe different lines have different patterns. Japanese are pretty obsessed with regional language differences, though. There's a comedy duo called "Yuji Koji" who hysterically make fun of the difference between the regions and Tokyo. Even my car Navi has a setting to make it talk with an Osaka accent. 300m saki, hidari yade.
tags: japan, rail, pronunciation, announcement

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-08-17T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Hot Brass, Percussion and Visual - BLAST!
Blast! was born from the Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps, which exited the DCI circuit to form Blast!, a kind of indoor, theatre-based "Brass Theatre" troupe taking the high skills of the best drum corps performers, and performing a kind of greatest hits of drum corps, to thrill audiences everywhere. (Not to mention winning Tony and Emmy awards as well.) The Japan Blast! tour features snare drummer Naoki Ishikawa, who was a champion "individuals" competitive snare player when he marched in DCI, and who is now a featured performer in the Japan Blast! show. He's got incredible chops, and they feature him well during the Battery Battle portion of the show. The video is the percussionists performing during the break between sets, on kitchen stools and a garbage pail. Humorous. :-) The Blast! performers did all the hot drum corps favorites like "Everybody Loves the Blues", "Appalachian Spring", "Medea", and "Malaguena" as well as a number of great numbers that were new to me. Overall, the show was about 2 hours of exciting music and visual performance, which had the audience on their feet by the end.
tags: blast!, ishikawa, naoki, star of indiana, tokyo

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Hot Brass, Percussion and Visual - Blast!

2009-08-14T21:57:00.001+09:00

My daughter and I went to see what's said to be the final Japan tour of Blast!. The brass, percussion and visual performers are young, but are among the best in the world on their instruments. The music and visual performance skills were out in force this afternoon.

If you're not familiar with Drum and Bugle Corps, it's mostly a summer activity governed by the non-profit organization "Drum Corps International", with corps members moving in around May to begin hard 12-hour "all days" rehearsals, and competing throughout the summer across the USA, until finals in August. Each corps has 150 members, which consist of brass, percussion and "color guard" members who do equipment work with rifles and flags while dancing. There are 12 corps competing for the top spot at finals, but many more corps at various skill levels competing all summer. These shows are performed on football fields in stadiums, but the similarity to college marching band ends there, since they exist to compete and perform like it too!

Blast! was born from the Star of Indiana Drum and Bugle Corps, which exited the DCI circuit to form Blast!, a kind of indoor, theatre-based "Brass Theatre" troupe taking the high skills of the best drum corps performers, and performing a kind of greatest hits of drum corps, to thrill audiences everywhere. (Not to mention winning Tony and Emmy awards as well.)

The Japan Blast! tour features snare drummer Naoki Ishikawa, who was a champion "individuals" competitive snare player when he marched in DCI, and who is now a featured performer in the Japan Blast! show. He's got incredible chops, and they feature him well during the Battery Battle portion of the show. The video is the percussionists performing during the break between sets, on kitchen stools and a garbage pail. Humorous. :-)

The Blast! performers did all the hot drum corps favorites like "Everybody Loves the Blues", "Appalachian Spring", "Medea", and "Malaguena" as well as a number of great numbers that were new to me. Overall, the show was about 2 hours of exciting music and visual performance, which had the audience on their feet by the end.

Kudos to Blast! for a great show!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-08-10T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - OS X Fonts, Managed by Linotype
If you pay any attention at all to typography, layout, type faces, fonts, leading, kerning, tracking and the like, and have ended up amassing a collection of type faces from the famous designers and font foundries, you'll end up needing some method of organization. The type face or font organizers that come with operating systems are basic, so vendors have channeled some Gutenberg and come up with replacements.
tags: linotype, fontexplorer, x, pro, fonts, type, typeface, manage
blog:Cogley - Buh-bye Plaxo, hello DavMail.
Despite its once-poor reputation, I have been using Plaxo to keep my iCal and Exchange calendar sync'ed as well as a way to keep in touch with business contacts. I've been syncing using the Plaxo Outlook client on an old clunker of a Windows box at work, to go Outlook to Plaxo, and also using the Plaxo iCal client on Mac OS X, to go iCal to Plaxo. It also works to sync Address Book entries. My goal in using it was to be able to use the Mail and iCal software in OS X, and not MS Entourage. I dislike Entourage because it puts your mail, calendar and address items in a single large monolithic database. Hard to back that up, and, it gets really, really large after a while.
tags: plaxo, davmail, fee, sync

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

OS X Fonts, Managed by Linotype

2009-08-04T00:38:00.001+09:00

If you pay any attention at all to typography, layout, type faces, fonts, leading, kerning, tracking and the like, and have ended up amassing a collection of type faces from the famous designers and font foundries, you'll end up needing some method of organization. The type face or font organizers that come with operating systems are basic, so vendors have channeled some Gutenberg and come up with replacements.

Linotype's FontExplorer X Pro 2.0 for Apple's OS X is one such program. I started out using their free, unsupported FontExplorer X and have recently trialled and purchased the pro, commercial version, called LinoType FontExplorer X Pro 2.0 available here for EUR 79 (as of 3 Aug 2009). As far as I'm concerned, it's worth every penny.

You can get details from this PDF brochure or from the website, but let me start by quoting from the manual:

FontExplorer X Pro is a powerful professional font management tool providing you with a clear overview and complete control over the fonts on your computer. FontExplorer X Pro helps you to organize your fonts according to your personal preferences, you can activate and deactivate fonts as you please, while functions such as font detection in documents make it easy for you to identify the fonts required for your projects. A recurring problem is that documents are frequently displayed incorrectly when the necessary fonts are not available on a computer. With FontExplorer X Pro you can now easily buy the fonts you need for a job via the FontExplorer X Pro Store.

FontExplorer X Pro ("FEX Pro" for short) gives you a complete type face or font management solution on OS X, and you can even have it manage a consolidated font library in a specific folder, a la the iTunes or iPhoto libraries. There are plenty of built-in fields that you can sort on and some built-in sets, but you can also tag, label or comment your fonts and create "smart sets" which are like iTunes smart playlists. You could create a set per project, for example, to indicate what fonts were used for a client job, or, you might create sets of pleasing combinations of fonts.

Aside from the customizable main-screen preview you can see in the screenshot at the top of this post, FEX Pro can show you all the details about a font file including version and format (OpenType or TrueType etc.), the complete character set and even missing characters as well as Unicode or HTML character codes, sample text in "running text" or "waterfall" formats, the legal information such as embedding rights, and kerning pairs.

Sounds Great, but What's the Point

But what's the point? Why manage your fonts? Every font file you load on your system requires resources to deploy. If you have 1000s of fonts, that's going to require a large amount of memory to load every time, and will certainly slow down application loading and system performance.

A major benefit of a font manager like FEX Pro, is that it lets you activate fonts when you need them, freeing system resources for other purposes. FEX Pro even lets you auto-activate fonts, deciding which apps can or cannot request fonts, and even associate a font set with a specific application so that that set gets loaded when, say, Photoshop loads.

Minor Issues

The gripes I have with FEX Pro are minor. I really love the application. However:

It should give advice on what combinations of fonts "work together" especially for non-designer types like me.

The consolidation method is opaque, and it should be easy.

Backup of font metadata you add, like labels, should be automatic.

What I had to do to consolidate my library into ~/Documents/Fonts was the following:

Set the library to my desired folder and tell FEX Pro to move the fonts there. This is done in Preferences, Advanced.

Backup all font files manually.

Run Tools menu, "Clean System Fonts Folders..." which moves any non-system font files from three system font folder locations to a backup folder on your desktop.

Re-import the backup folder on the desktop, letting FEX Pro organize into its folder.

Check for duplicates and prune.

That's too many steps when it could be a single step that does things in a non-invasive way, to get you ready to use a single folder, if you're a user wanting a simple solution.

Get It

My recommendation is, if you're on OS X and care about type aesthetics, buy FontExplorer X Pro. It's worth it and is a welcome addition to any OS X user's toolkit.

Plaxo Outlook Sync Now Fee-based, going DavMail

2009-08-03T16:26:00.001+09:00

Despite its once-poor reputation, I have been using Plaxo to keep my iCal and Exchange calendar sync'ed as well as a way to keep in touch with business contacts. I've been syncing using the Plaxo Outlook client on an old clunker of a Windows box at work, to go Outlook to Plaxo, and also using the Plaxo iCal client on Mac OS X, to go iCal to Plaxo. It also works to sync Address Book entries. My goal in using it was to be able to use the Mail and iCal software in OS X, and not MS Entourage. I dislike Entourage because it puts your mail, calendar and address items in a single large monolithic database. Hard to back that up, and, it gets really, really large after a while.

At any rate, that setup working around Plaxo has worked well for me, but last week as of 30 July 2009, Plaxo changed tacks and will start charging for the Outlook sync services. This is part of the announcement email they sent me:

Act now: keep your Outlook Contacts in sync

Outlook sync will become part of Plaxo Premium effective July 30, 2009. This change will allow us to continue to invest in the development and support of this valuable (but high-cost) feature. In order to continue syncing your Outlook address book and calendar via Plaxo, you'll need to upgrade to Plaxo Premium.

If you act before July 30, you can lock in a 20% lifetime discount on Plaxo Premium. You'll get Plaxo Premium for $47.95/year, a $12.00/year savings off the regular $59.95 annual subscription price. In addition, you can try Premium, risk-free, for 30 days.

Of course, I appreciate that Plaxo might quite reasonably want to charge for sync, since it's got to be one of the most difficult things to do, programmatically. Lots of variables and expensive to maintain. Not being interested in yet another subscription service however, I decided to re-visit the topic and see if I could find a way to sync for less coin than that. I assume that since iPhone OS 3.0 supports connectivity to Exchange, that native Exchange connectivity for OS X iCal cannot be far behind.

Meanwhile, however, to have this iCal:Exchange sync while we wait for Snow Leopard, one can make use of the excellent open source project "DavMail." This is a simple app you start at login and keep running, that brokers connections between IMAP, CalDav and LDAP clients, and an Exchange server. You set it up for your platform, which in my case was Mac OS X, and then set up your Calendar, Mail and Directory so they access ports on localhost, your local machine.

DavMail sits there listening for the connections you set up, and it then talks to your Exchange server as though it were an Outlook Web Access server. Pretty slick, and it uses only about 70MB of memory and hardly any CPU on my system.

If it crashes and burns, I'll let you know in an update. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-07-27T01:30:00.001+09:00

Snap!Japan - Japan Marine Day's Imperial Roots
The third Monday in July is "Marine Day" here in Japan, called "Umi no Hi" (海の日) in Japanese. It was established in 1996, a few years into my life in Japan. It's common knowledge that the day marks the return of the Emperor Meiji from a boat trip. More specifically, it's the day of his return to Yokohama port in Meiji 9 (1876), from a royal light-house inspection tour to the northernmost prefectures, on a Scottish-built schooner called the "Meiji Maru".
tags: umi, no, hi, marine, day, japan

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-07-20T01:30:00.001+09:00

blog:Cogley - Twitter Meishi Generator from @faa
Twitter user @faa has created a "Twitter Meishi Generator", or, "TMG", which you can use to create a Twitter business card with your last tweet or bio, a QR code of your URL, in an assortment of delightful colors. Click the image to see an annotated version of this Twitter Tool.
tags: @faa, rick, cogley, twitter, meishi, generator, business, card
Snap!Japan - Kenkoshindan Health Check
My wife and I did our yearly "kenkoshindan" health check via our insurance provider the other day. If you are on the national insurance plan or one of the big alternative providers, you're supposed to get this kenkoshindan once a year. My wife and my secretary at work badgered me into submission, so I finally took the plunge and got the big one-day "ningen dock" (人間ドック, and kind of like "human dry-dock" in its meaning). So What's this Ningen Dock? Glad you asked. Being over 40 (ok, ok, I'm 43), this time I signed up for the standard ningen dock set, instead of the wimpy blood and urine test only. Once you get to the center, after NOT eating breakfast, they give you a nice top/bottom to change into, so you to to a locker room, strip to your skivvies and put that on. It's not a paper gown like you might see at an ER, but a proper outfit much like pajamas. The arms were short and the bottoms were held up by a drawstring. They include socks too, in case you wear the ones with the holes (like me!) on the big day.
tags: kenkoshindan, health, check, japan
blog:Cogley - Shared iTunes Music Storage
My family has a shared iMac G5 running Leopard OS X 10.5.7 and iTunes 8.2 (both the latest as of 13 July 2009), and recently I noticed we were running low on disk space, so I did some digging via du at the command line. I found that we were eating space by ingesting CDs into iTunes, which would get copied to our respective local user folders. After a little research, I found the Apple KB article that describes how to have a single storage location for music, so I set that up and made some other discoveries in the process. I thought I'd share how I did it.
tags: productivity, itunes, shared, library, music

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twitter Meishi Generator from @faa

2009-07-14T12:37:00.001+09:00

Twitter user @faa has created a "Twitter Meishi Generator", or, "TMG", which you can use to create a Twitter business card with your last tweet or bio, a QR code of your URL, in an assortment of delightful colors. Click the image to see an annotated version of this Twitter Tool.

So, How Does One Actually Create a Meishi from the TMG?

Never fear. Here's how to use the Twitter Meishi Generator:

Visit the Twitter Meishi Generator.

Enter your Twitter user name.

Choose what to put in the meishi's callout - your last tweet, your bio, or none.

Click the radio button next to the color you desire.

Click the "meishi wo tsukuru" button.

Behold your sparkly-new meishi.

Click the "Download Large PNG" button. (Don't worry, it's not so large).

Forward this post to your friends!

Faa used the free M+1P+IPAG font to generate the meishi's font, and is generating the QR codes via the Google Chart API. Thanks, Faa, very cool!

Shared iTunes Music Storage

2009-07-13T14:18:00.001+09:00

My family has a shared iMac G5 running Leopard OS X 10.5.7 and iTunes 8.2 (both the latest as of 13 July 2009), and recently I noticed we were running low on disk space, so I did some digging via du at the command line. I found that we were eating space by ingesting CDs into iTunes, which would get copied to our respective local user folders.

After a little research, I found the Apple KB article that describes how to have a single storage location for music, so I set that up and made some other discoveries in the process. I thought I'd share how I did it.

To determine what folder is using what space, you can use the "du" command in the Terminal. After you do a "sudo bash" to set the Terminal to root access, you can do a "cd /Users" and then a "du -hsc *" to check sizes of all the user folders under /Users.

To find a location where your family's music can be shared, you need either a folder on an external drive or somewhere on the default internal drive. For now, we chose /Users/Shared/Music.

Confirm where files are located by selecting a song, and pressing cmd-I. In Summary, you'll see the path of the song in the "Where" section.

Create the Music folder in /Users/Shared and set its permissions so all users can see it. If it is not set already you can do this via the cmd-I "information" interface for the folder, or, using chmod from the Terminal.

In the first user, change the "iTunes Music Folder Location" in iTunes Preferences, Advanced. Also in Preferences, make sure "Keep iTunes Folder Organized" and "Copy Files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library" are checked. OK out of Preferences.

Next do File, Library, Consolidate Library, which copies any files outside the shared library into the library's location, which is now /Users/Shared/Music. This takes a while for large libraries, and will move not only the files from your original iTunes library location, but also any files that you had dragged in from Downloads or the Desktop, for example.

After consolidation completes, confirm where your song files are located by selecting a song, and pressing cmd-I. In Summary, you'll see the path of the song in the "Where" section. It should now be /Users/Shared/Music or wherever you specified in Preferences.

Now, you are ready to share with other users, but before you do that, go to iTunes Preferences, Advanced, and turn off "Copy Files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to Library", remembering to turn that back on if and when you consolidate again.

Prove that CDs will add to the right location by importing a CD, and confirming where the song files are located (cmd-I on the song file).

Log into another user, start iTunes, and repeat the location set, library consolidation process. Import a second CD into this second user's library, and confirm it is saved in /Users/Shared/Music.

Return to your original user, and to add that CD the second user added to your library, do "File, Add to Library" and choose /Users/Shared/Music. By choosing the root of your library, iTunes will check what has not been added, and add it. Your original user should now be able to find the second user's CD in his or her library.

With this method, each user maintains their own ratings and playlists, but there's a slight delay each time someone adds a CD or downloads from the iTunes Store, because you have to "refresh" the library in File, Add to Library.

I hope this helps someone understand what they have to do to share music amongst family members and avoid eating up disk space. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-07-13T01:30:00.001+09:00

TweakHeadz Lab Electronic Musician's Hangout.
The site motto says it best: "The #1 Site for Learning about Home and Project Studios."
tags: tweakheads, studio, electronic, music, sequencer
blog:Cogley - Japan DVD-HDD Video Recorder Incompatibility
The other day I was asked by a friend to see a Ken Watanabe TV show we had recorded, because the friend had missed it. A long saga ensued of us trying to give our friend a DVD of the recording we took with our Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder. You'd think that you would just be able to play such a DVD in any DVD player. Well, you can't. Long story short, in the end we could not provide our friend a DVD with this show on it. At first, when we gave our friend the DVD, she returned it saying it was broken, and that she tried it on her normal DVD player and on her Windows PC. I tried it on a Mac and on a Windows PC, and indeed, it would not play back. I accessed the created DVD as a data disk, and was able to retrieve a 4 GB file with a VRO extension. I found out that VRO is an MPEG-2 format, so I purchased the MPEG-2 playback plugin for QuickTime. After the installation, QuickTime would open the file, but nothing appeared in the QuickTime viewer screen.
tags: Japan, DVD, HDD, VRO, Recorder, Incompatibility

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Japan DVD-HDD Video Recorder Incompatibility

2009-07-06T13:59:00.001+09:00

The other day I was asked by a friend to see a Ken Watanabe TV show we had recorded, because the friend had missed it. A long saga ensued of us trying to give our friend a DVD of the recording we took with our Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder. You'd think that you would just be able to play such a DVD in any DVD player. Well, you can't. Long story short, in the end we could not provide our friend a DVD with this show on it.

At first, when we gave our friend the DVD, she returned it saying it was broken, and that she tried it on her normal DVD player and on her Windows PC. I tried it on a Mac and on a Windows PC, and indeed, it would not play back.

I accessed the created DVD as a data disk, and was able to retrieve a 4 GB file with a VRO extension. I found out that VRO is an MPEG-2 format, so I purchased the MPEG-2 playback plugin for QuickTime. After the installation, QuickTime would open the file, but nothing appeared in the QuickTime viewer screen.

I tried also the following:

Renaming the file's extension to VOB or MPG. No difference trying to play it back in DVD Player.

Viewing the files (.vro, .vob, .mpg) in VLC. Nada.

Viewing the files in MPEG Streamclip. Nope.

Viewing the files in MPlayer. Uh uh.

Burning the file to another DVD via Toast. Sorry, it would not even render.

Well, after lots of tries and googling, in the end I read that Japanese makers protect their VRO files, and while there appear to be ways of modifying the file using a hex editor, I did not want to go there.

There's apparently no easy way to play back a DVD you create on a Sharp Aquos DVD / HDD Recorder on a PC or Mac.

Too bad, and what a waste of an evening.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-06-29T01:28:00.001+09:00

Snap!Japan - Japan and Its People are Unique
At least that is what they tell me! I like Japan and have had some interesting, enjoyable and indeed unique experiences here, otherwise I would not have stayed in this country since 1987. But over the years, I've had an earful of people telling me directly or indirectly how unique Japan and its people are, and I've had to burst more than one person's bubble. Sometimes incorrectly.
tags: rick cogley, nihonjinron, culture, japan, intestines, snow, pregnancy
Snap!Japan - "Gyaru-go" Girl Japanese
Mezamashi TV had a segment on the lastest gyaru language. If you're not familiar, gyaru are the sort of schoolgirls who hang out in Shibuya or Harajuku, dress in the latest fashion and speak in a sort of code. Here's the three I remember: * ムカTK mukaTK - mukatsuku, to be pissed off. The original's just as easy, ladies. * モレる moreru - um, to be dressed up, with your hair in a bun with cute accessories. Comes from "moritsukeru" to decorate. * シカメ shikame - from shikato and meeru, ignore mail. To have blown off answering someone's text message. I hear that a large percentage of schoolkids get really stressed about "shikame", in all seriousness. At any rate, remembering these is one thing, but using them is another, so remember this: if an "oyaji" (middle-aged guy) like me uses gyaru-go, he's ostracized by his daughters and subjected to the "uzai" label for all time. :-)
tags: gyaru, Rick Cogley, harajuku, shibuya
blog:Cogley - iPhone 3GS Unfairly Expensive in Japan
I went to a Softbank shop in Shibuya, Tokyo and asked how much it would cost to upgrade an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS. The clerk told me that for the 16GB model it would be an additional JPY 780 per month for 24 months, totaling JPY 18,720, assuming the continuation of my current contract. That sounded about right to me, given the US prices. I wanted to see if I could just buy one outright, and slipped into another general electronics store that was selling iPhones from Softbank and other phones. Unfortunately, the clerk in the second store told me that the "discount" you get with a new contract is not valid for the upgrade, so you end up paying a total of about JPY 70,000. Additionally, you cannot just buy a phone in the US and have it activated for use here. Yep. That's a whopping USD 700.00 for an iPhone 3GS from Softbank Japan, and the "after discount" pricing is only for new contracts, not for upgraders. Wow, I'm stunned (while at the same time I'm hoping I'm wrong) at being penalized for wanting to upgrade. What a way to engender loyalty, Softbank. I guess the only thing to do is to wait until Softbank change the pricing, which they eventually did for the 3G, after some time had passed. I feel like a lifeless husk that's been trampled on and ground into dust. :-/ Rick Cogley
tags: iphone, 3GS, gadgets, softbank, expensive, unfair, upgrade, japan
Snap!Japan - "One Coin" Services All The Rage in Japan
Japan morning TV reported that "One Coin" (ワンコイン) services are all the rage these days in Japan, due to the down economy. What this phrase means is that you can buy a good or service with a single 500 yen coin, or about USD 5.00. Indeed, you can see them here and there: * "Makudonarudo" McDonald's has a 500 yen value set. * "One Coin" lunches at salary-man lunch joints. * Short foot massages for 500 yen. * "Test Esthe" at Miss Paris Esthetic Salon for "one coin". * Yoshinoya and Matsuya meat bowls for 500 yen. Next time you're out and about in Tokyo, keep an eye out for "one coin" ワンコイン services. Rick Cogley
tags: trends, Engrish, 500, ワンコイン, economy, inexpensive

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

iPhone 3GS Unfairly Expensive in Japan for Upgraders

2009-06-22T23:36:00.001+09:00

I went to a Softbank shop in Shibuya, Tokyo and asked how much it would cost to upgrade an iPhone 3G to an iPhone 3GS. The clerk told me that for the 16GB model it would be an additional JPY 780 per month for 24 months, totaling JPY 18,720, assuming the continuation of my current contract. That sounded about right to me, given the US prices.

I wanted to see if I could just buy one outright, and slipped into another general electronics store that was selling iPhones from Softbank and other phones. Unfortunately, the clerk in the second store told me that the "discount" you get with a new contract is not valid for the upgrade, so you end up paying a total of about JPY 70,000. Additionally, you cannot just buy a phone in the US and have it activated for use here.

Yep. That's a whopping USD 700.00 for upgrading to an iPhone 3GS from Softbank Japan, and the "after discount" pricing is only for new contracts, not for upgraders. Wow, I'm stunned (while at the same time I'm hoping I'm wrong) at being penalized for wanting to upgrade. What a way to engender loyalty, Softbank.

I guess the only thing to do is to wait until Softbank change the pricing, which they eventually did for the 3G, after some time had passed.

I feel like a lifeless husk that's been trampled on and ground into dust. :-/

Update

24 June 2009 - I've heard conflicting reports on this situation, stating that you can upgrade and that you cannot upgrade in Japan, and that you can or cannot buy iPhones from the US or China and bring them here to use. However, from the Japan Times newspaper this AM, it appears that you will be able to buy an iPhone 3GS with no contract. I assume this is from Apple. The question is, can I just pop my existing SIM in there.

As for the cost, the 16 gigabyte model is priced at ¥11,520, and the 32 GB is ¥23,040, on a special campaign offer, while it retails at ¥23,040 (16 GB) and ¥34,560 (32GB) for those wanting the phone out of contract. —Japan Times 24 June 2009

26 June 2009 - I went to Apple, who told me that, no, despite the statement in the Japan Times you must have a contract. They concurred with Softbank's statement that you'd lose the discount on your 3G, and that you'd end up paying the approx JPY 70,000 yen over two years. What I did learn was that you could do a "kishu henkou" (model change) after you've completed paying off the original 3G. Wow, what a blow.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-06-22T01:28:00.001+09:00

Snap!Japan - Tokyo Metro Manners Posters
Artist Bunpei Yorifuji (寄藤文平) is creating a series of manner posters for the Tokyo metro, around the theme of "Do It At Home". Yorifuji was born in Nagano Prefecture, Japan, in 1973, and founded Bunpei Ginza in 2000 to specialize in mainly Art Direction, Illustration and Book Design. Yorifuji's manners posters address the most common complaints heard by the Metro, such as people who apply makeup, party, sit on the floor, take up too much room, jump through the closing doors at the last minute, wear Everest-assault-sized backbacks and so on. I have to chuckle at the rather awkward and sometimes double-entendre Engrish, but that's what gives them charm, I suppose. I even found a spoof poster. See the thumbs below for the spoof poster and the official website.
tags: Bunpei Yorifuji, Rick Cogley, manners, posters, Tokyo Metro
ISM Adamo Saddles
Sounds good, if it will eliminate the numbness. —Rick Cogley || From the site: What is an ISM saddle? - The original ISM saddle was designed to create a seat that would eliminate, or at least reduce, the discomfort most riders experience on a traditional bike saddle. The concept was patented by 1999. In 2008 alone, ISM has seen success with 11 Ironman wins, 2 Olympic silver medals, 1 World Duathlon Championship, 1 Lifetime Fitness Series overall win, and countless age group victories. Pros and amateurs alike are finding riding and competing comfortable again. Why is an ISM saddle so comfortable? Our patented saddles are unisex and remove pressure off the pudendal nerve and arteries in both male and female riders for un-paralleled comfort. Click here for more information: FAQ ISM.doc Click here for set up instructions: adamo_setup.pdf Ready to order a saddle? Email us at : info@t1bicycles.comshapeimage_2_link_0shapeimage_2_link_1shapeimage_2_link_2 Race Saddle JPY 19,000 Peloton Saddle JPY 14,000 Medical Information: On an annual basis, bicycle riding involves several hundred million people worldwide. Studies have linked perineal pressure caused by straddling traditional bicycle seats to numbness, urinary tract and yeast infections, prostate inflammation and impotence. For male riders, in addition to the discomfort and numbness associated with a traditional saddle, there is an increased susceptibility to restricted blood flow, which can lead to arterial occlusion and permanent erectile dysfunction. For women, the restricted blood flow and hardening of the genital arteries can lead to an inability to reach orgasm. It has been found that as little as 11% of a person’s body weight can compress the genital artery! IN 2004, Dr. Frank Sommer at the University of Cologne tested the ISM saddle. Dr. Sommer is a noted expert in the area of arterial occlusion resulting from bicycle saddles.
tags: ISM, Adamo, Saddles, t1bicycles, roppongi, perineal, pressure
Snap!Japan - Ray-Out's iPhone "Jacket" Case Review and DIY Fix
I purchased Ray-Out's reasonably-priced leather "Jacket" case, model RT-P1LC4/B, perhaps three months ago from Yodobashi Camera. I was looking for a case that had a "strap loop" so that I could hang the iPhone around my neck for going to meetings or lunch, as I don't trust myself to put the iPhone in my pocket and have it survive even one day! The Ray-Out leather jacket was one option, and the other was so bling-bling it wasn't even a choice for me. DIY Fix for the RT-P1LC4/B Loop Problem Unfortunately, the D-ring that came attached to the case by a leather loop came off, sending the iPhone plummeting to the ground. At least the case's leather hit the ground instead of the actual phone, so my iPhone still works. Ray-Out should re-design that little loop for the D-Ring, because after even a couple month's of use, it became weak and ripped.
tags: RT-P1LC4_B, Ray-Out, Leather, Case, iPhone, Rick Cogley, DIY
Nikon D90 | How To Use D-MOVIE
A tutorial video from Nikon on the D90's video capability. —Rick Cogley || From the site: A new idea for D-SLRs, the D90 offers a movie function, allowing you to shoot movies in three different motion JPEG formats: 320 x 216 pixels, 640 x 424 pixels and 1,280 x 720 pixels. Now you can capture life’s moving moments with added drama by using many of Nikon’s NIKKOR lenses, including the AF DX Fisheye 10.5mm f/2.8G ED and the Micro-NIKKOR lenses. The shallow depth of field can give your movies a more creative and emotional impact. An additional benefit is the D90 image sensor, which is much larger than a typical camcorder for higher image quality and exceptional high ISO performance during low-light shooting.
tags: Nikon, Photography, D90, D-Movie, Video
Snap!Japan - Drop - Toilet Paper Horror
"Drop" is a horror story novella written by Koji Suzuki, the writer of best-selling horror stories such as "Ring" and "Rasen" (Spiral). Suzuki san was born in 1957 in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, and his books have sold more than 8 million copies. —Rick Cogley
tags: drop, koji suzuki, novella, horror
So you think you know Apple? Test your mettle.
Test your mettle against the Network World Quiz-o-Matic. —Rick Cogley || From the site: Whether you love Apple or could live without it, the company holds an iconic place in IT history. Most people think they know that history pretty well. But here are 10 trivia questions with answers that might surprise you. After you take the quiz, head over to Yoni Heisler's iOnApple blog and share your score.
tags: network, world, quiz, mythology, apple
blog:Cogley - iPhone OS 3.0 Tips on Parade
Apple released yesterday an updated iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 3.0, with a number of useful improvements. For me, the update itself was seamless, and took about 15 minutes after clicking the update button in iTunes. I upgraded first thing in the morning, but colleagues who tried later in the day had some delays. I guess it's to be expected when so many people try to download at the same time. Some Tips for iPhone OS 3.0 I took some screenshots of the obvious and not-so-obvious (by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously in case you aren't aware how), so I'll introduce those to you now.
tags: iPhone, OS, 3.0, Tips, Rick Cogley
About artist Miwa YANAGI
From the site: http://www.yanagimiwa.net/e/profile/index.html Born in Kobe City Education : Kyoto City University of Arts Lives in Kyoto In 1993 , held solo exhibition in Kyoto Since 1996, participated exhibitions in Europe and U.S.A. Create The "My Grandmothers" series which visualize the self-perceived notions of several young women when asked to imagine what type of woman they themselves might become fifty years later. In 2004 , held solo exhibition in Deutsche Guggenheim and Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2005 , show "Fairy tale" series which are tales about girl and elderly woman in Hara Museum and Ohara Museum of Art. In 2007 , held solo exhibition in Chelsea Art Museum (New York). In 2008 , held solo exhibition in The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston).
tags: yanagi, miwa, profile, bio
Miwa YANAGI, a provocative artist who uses makeup and props to tell her stories. —Rick Cogley |
Miwa Yanagi is showing at the Japanese Pavilion, at the The 53rd Venice Biennale 2009. The installation is called "Windswept Women：The Old Girls' Troupe".
tags: miwa yanagi, venice, biennale, 2009, windswept women
Chuck Dillon's blog 30 x 30: Which Student are You?
Chuck Dillon posts some prescient and hysterical drawings of the 16 breeds of art student. —Rick Cogley || From the site: I know 10 years is not a long time, but by this time in my teaching career I think I have had just about every type of student. Earlier this year to relieve my stress I started categorizing and sketching out each student type (Comic artist Daniel Clowes already touched on this categorization in his great comic, Art School Confidential). What I wound up with are these 16 types. Over time, I may discover that there are more types or new names for them (ie: goth is now something called emo). Originally I had excluded the average/good students because average/good is not very funny but with much pleading and begging I added it in.
tags: chuck dillon, blog30x30, art students

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

iPhone OS 3.0 Tips on Parade

2009-06-19T09:54:00.001+09:00

Apple released yesterday an updated iPhone operating system, iPhone OS 3.0, with a number of useful improvements. For me, the update itself was seamless, and took about 15 minutes after clicking the update button in iTunes. I upgraded first thing in the morning, but colleagues who tried later in the day had some delays. I guess it's to be expected when so many people try to download at the same time.

Some Tips for iPhone OS 3.0

I took some screenshots of the obvious and not-so-obvious (by pressing the home and power buttons simultaneously in case you aren't aware how), so I'll introduce those to you now.

If you have MobileMe you can enable Find My iPhone and track where the phone is if it is stolen, via GPS. You can also remote-wipe and send messages and sounds to your iPhone. Maybe you won't get the iPhone back, but you can at least antagonize the thief! The sounds and messages will play even if it's locked, so this will help if the iPhone is in "manner" mode.

I suspect it will be useful for when it's in manner mode but lost somewhere in the nether regions of your sofa.

iPhone OS 3.0 now finally has select, copy and paste, and it works in and across various applications. Even the new TweetDeck for iPhone that was just released supports it already. Press and hold to get the selection "handles" and various commands.

Once something is on the clipboard you can paste. You can see I copied from TweetDeck to Mail. The new clipboard also honors rich text, which means you can copy something like formatted text from a webpage in Safari, to a Mail Message, and it will paste it in just as you saw it on the web. Slick!

You can also select in mail to "quote" part of a message before replying. It works more like Leopard OS X.

iPhone OS 3.0 now has Spotlight. You can swipe the left-most home screen right to get spotlight search, and you'll see that the page icon (the dots at the bottom) is actually a magnifying glass. Spotlight search works across apps, and like big sister OS Leopard OS X, also works to find apps so you can launch them. Check your settings as well - you can link "home button double-press" to Spotlight search if you like.

Lastly, you'll find that many apps with lists, like Address Book and Mail have a search box at the top. This is Spotlight, but as you scroll down through the entries, you can double-tap the very top of the screen (near the clock) to jump back to the top. Try it!

In Address Book you can now send an Address Card as a vCard entry via Email or MMS (which Softbank Japan supports). Scroll down to the bottom of a contact to find the share buttons.

Here's what a shared vCard in .vcf format via Email looks like. Note also another new feature: the Landscape keyboard is available in more apps, negating the need for apps like EasyWriter.

While we're on Mail, you can move messages instead of just deleting them in the Edit screen. Convenient for stuff like spam.

Neat stuff on the podcast front, too. In iPod, you can control podcast playback better, with the "jump back 30 seconds" and the speed changer buttons. There's also a button for emailing the actual link to the podcast so you can share it with friends.

When you click the email icon from the podcast, you get a pre-formatted email with a link to the podcast.

There are plenty of tiny new tweaks, including this almost incomprehensible one, showing you a very small thumbnail of the last photo you snapped. Maybe it's fuzzy because I merely have a 3G and not a shiny new 3GS.

A couple more things:

MS Exchange integration is much better, but note that the interface in Address books allows you to "view all", so it might look like you have duplicates if you keep your MobileMe and Exchange address books synced.

iTunes now lets you buy & download whatever's in the iTunes store.

iPod lets you "shake to shuffle".

There's a new basic Voice Recorder app that lets you record and share voice memos. Nice.

They've improved the keyboard "secret" hold-to-see shortcuts. Check it out by going to the numbers and symbols keyboard, then holding down various keys.

While browsing in Safari, you can press and hold a link to get a popup that lets you open the link in another tab.

You can shake to undo in the main applications like Mail or Messaging.

If you own an iPhone, you can upgrade for free, and there's a small fee to upgrade if you have an iPod Touch. Try it, I'm sure you'll like it. It really makes the iPhone an even more attractive platform. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-06-15T01:28:00.001+09:00

Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames - Anil Dash - Annotated
It's so funny it speaks for itself. Check out Anil Dash's predictive expose of how the Facebook username debacle might go down. FU! —Rick Cogley || From the site: Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames 10 Jun 2009 The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.
tags: facebook, usernames, username, anil, prediction, dash
TOSBack | The Terms-Of-Service Tracker
TOSBack is an useful service that monitors changes in various web services' Terms of Service. Click "Subscribe to RSS" on the site to monitor it in your RSS reader (such as NetNewsWire or Google Reader). —Rick Cogley From the site: TOSBack keeps an eye on ... website policies. Every time one of them changes, you'll see an update here.
tags: privacy, TOS, legal, security, tosback, google, terms, changes, rss, terms of service
Daring Fireball: WWDC 2009 Predictions
John Gruber's Daring Fireball WWDC 2009 predictions. —Rick Cogley || From the site: WWDC 2009 Predictions - Sunday, 7 June 2009 What I know, don’t know, and know I don’t know about tomorrow’s WWDC announcements. As usual, please, no wagering. iPhone 3GS Everything I wrote about last month in “The Next iPhone” still stands. I expect Apple to announce updated iPhones with significantly faster processors, twice the RAM, and twice the storage. I expected prices to remain the same as the current lineup: $199/299 for 16/32 GB, respectively. The video camera is going to be a major selling point. One additional tidbit I’ve heard is the new hardware’s code name: iPhone 3GS. I’m not certain that’s what it’ll be officially named, but my hunch is yes. I have no idea what the S stands for.1 The other new tidbit is battery life: 15-20 percent longer than the iPhone 3G.
tags: daringfireball, john gruber, wwdc, 2009, predictions

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-06-08T01:28:00.001+09:00

Mike Reed's "Flame Warriors" Home
This is Mike Reed's humorous look at the various personalities you'll encounter on the Internet. Very funny! —Rick Cogley || From the site: Some years ago a minor spat ignited a searing flame ware that threatened to consume a once-placid discussion forum. While the forum burned I amused myself by caricaturiing the chief antagonists. Confounded at seeing themselves thus revealed, the combatants fled the field in disarray. ...
tags: humor, warriors, flame, humour, blogging, forum, cartoon, culture
Snap!Japan - Street Jazz Trio with Kano, Saito and Kawamoto
I've seen this good, energetic "Street Jazz" trio at JR Shinjuku before, but today I waited for a good moment and got some materials from them. The musicians were George Kano on drums, Chikara Saito on Alto Sax, and (probably) Sousuke Kawamoto on upright bass. The flyers I got were pretty clear on who the sax and drum players were, but I'm not so sure about the bass player. Either way, they are all really good musicians. —Rick Cogley
tags: snapjapan, cogley, chikara saito, george kano, sousuke kawamoto, street, jazz
Josh George Art Blog: Pat Metheny "Tokyo Day Trip" EP
Josh George did the paintings for the album art for Pat Metheny's Day Trip and Tokyo Day Trip EP. —Rick Cogley || From the site: Earlier this year I did the CD cover and interior art for Pat Metheny's newest release "Day Trip". It was great fun having almost complete creative freedom. During the bands world tour they did a live recording of their gig in Tokyo and decided to release it as an EP. Again they contacted me to do a variation on the cover but set in Japan. I don't do to many illustration jobs but working with a respected musician like Pat was very rewarding. Didn't have to do a sketch first! So here is the cover for "Tokyo Day Trip". You can find it in your local non-chain music store. I buy all my music at "Music Matters" in Brooklyn.
tags: josh george, pat metheny, day trip, tokyo day trip, painter, metheny
Lifehacker - Save time with text substitution - Keyboard Shortcuts
Text substitution tools. Personally, I use Text Expander which is quite excellent on the Mac, but LifeHacker recommends ActiveText for Windows. —Rick Cogley || From the site: These days, most of us end up having to type at the computer on a daily basis. Some of us are fast and some are slow - but regardless of your typing proficiency, text substitutions can save us all an unbelievable amount of time. The basic idea is to replace a small bit of text with a larger bit of text. So maybe you set 'name' to 'your full name'. Admittedly, this is probably overkill, but it gets the idea across. Apply a small amount of effort and simple text substitution becomes a tool more powerful and dynamic than you might have imagined. Let's see just how much we can streamline your time at the keyboard.
tags: lifehacker, substitution, text, activetext, textexpander, smileonmymac, productivity
Snap!Japan - Oshogatsu Reunion (New Year) Sad
Every year, we have a family reunion during the New Year holiday "oshogatsu". The photo in this post is of the 2009 edition. This is A Big Deal for the family here, and they do it without fail. Missing it is also A Big Deal, so I think we've missed it once in the past 15 years. I gather it's an Asian thing to have these big family gatherings, but I always feel like the odd man out, when the conversation turns to whatever it is that 60-ish-year-old Japanese folks like to talk about. Though I enjoy the company and drink and food, great food, these also make me long for home, to see my Mom and Dad, Sister and Brother and everyone's families and friends. Ah, if only Star Trek teleportation was possible! Oshogatsu omedeto!
tags: resident, snapjapan, reunion, oshogatsu, cogley
Squarespace - Simple, On-line, Website Publishing
Squarespace offers a turnkey way to build and publish a site and blog online from 8 USD / month, with some really good-looking results. Seems like it would be perfect for people who do not want to use software and upload via FTP. —Rick Cogley || From the site - In 2003, after being unable to ﬁnd a way to elegantly publish his personal website, Anthony Casalena began work on the software that is now the Squarespace Platform. Since its inception, Squarespace has blossomed into a product that powers tens of thousands of sophisticated websites for businesses, bloggers, and professionals worldwide and currently serves hundreds of millions of hits per month. Squarespace has been mentioned in both the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek, as well as on countless other blogs and news sites. Our small team consists of solely bio-worthy names, and due to our entirely organic revenue growth, we operate free from the restrictions and obligations of organizations controlled by outside investors.
tags: squarespace, anthony casalena, web, publish, blog, online
Lawrence Lessig: The Solipsist and the Internet (a Review of Helprin's Digital Barbarism)
Creative Commons founding member Lawrence Lessig's long retort to the ill-informed attack by Mark Helprin on Creative Commons. —Rick Cogley || From the site: This is an insanely long review of Mark Helprin's book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009) (Note: if you buy from that link, Creative Commons gets the referral fee). You can download a PDF of the review here. Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist. The piece caused something of a digital riot. As we learn now from his book, Digital Barbarism (HarperCollins 2009), Mark Helprin was at the time completely ignorant about the hornets nest he was about to kick. For him, the op-ed was a professional rapprochement with the New York Times, a chance to make things right once again (though why they were then wrong is a story left mysteriously (and thankfully) out of the book).
tags: helprin, lessig, solipsist, digital, barbarism, creative commons, cc
Why "Everything Buckets" make sense: Mark Bernstein (Tinderbox designer)
Mark Bernstein, creator of TinderBox, writes in defense of "everything buckets" that Alex Payne rails against in a blog post. —Rick Cogley || From the site: What Payne misses — what nearly everyone has missed in thinking about the question — is the process of finding and creating structure. Yes: you want to keep things organized. Yes: you want specialized tools for special tasks. But things don’t arrive with structure (and, when they do, they have the wrong structure!) and the kinds of structure you want are always changing.
tags: bernstein, tinderbox, payne, everything buckets
Alex Payne — The Case Against Everything Buckets
Alex Payne makes a case for using the file system on computers, and against "everything buckets" like Journler, Yojimbo, DEVONthink, Together, Evernote. —Rick Cogley || From the site: Why Everything Buckets Are Not A Good Idea - Computers work best with structured data. Everything Buckets discourage the use of structured data by providing a convenient place to commingle “structureless” data like RTF and PDF documents. Rather than forcing the user to figure out the rhyme and reason of their data (for example, by putting receipts in a financial management application and addresses in an address book), Everything Buckets cry: “throw it all in here! Search it! Maybe I’ll corrupt my proprietary database, but maybe I won’t and you’ll have the joy of sifting through a mire of RTF documents. Doesn’t that sound great?” This proposition should not sound great. If you think you’re going to save time in the long run by throwing your data into a big bucket now, then sifting through it later, you are mistaken. There are better ways.
tags: payne, buckets, everything buckets, journler, yojimbo, devonthink, together, evernote
Dating DEVONThink (after being jilted by Journler) - dougist.com
On the unfortunate loss of focus at Journler, and Doug's consequent "dating" of DEVONthink. —Rick Cogley || From the site: Journler was the answer, but as I’ve just learned, unfunded solo developers are very risky. Who else to turn to? Together concerns me because it gags on data sets over a few thousand items. Evernote’s business model is committed to datalocking you into the application, which is intolerable. Yohimbo is a starter tool not a long haul application for a serous user. Lastly the Lit / Citation managers, like Papers, Zotero, Endnote and Sente are indexers, not writer’s base pads. So yea, DEVONThink. She’s good right now, but I’m lookin’
tags: dougist.com, dougist, devonthink, journler
This Land - A Town Fights to Save an Oasis of Baguettes - Series - NYTimes.com
A wonderful story of a visa denied, and a community's response. Long live the small shops! -- Rick Cogley From the site: A French couple came to town several years ago in search of something. Here, amid the swelling mountains and struggling businesses, the Red Sox hagiography and Yankee taciturnity, they were looking for just the right place to sell madeleines. And croissants. And tarts. And long, thin loaves of French bread that all but dare you to tear at their heel before you’re out the door.
tags: baguettes, colebrook, ounis, visa, denial, reconsideration
Snap!Japan - OTC Drugs at your Local 7-11
The Pharmaceutical Affairs Law "PAL" was revised to allow convenience stores like 7-11, Lawson, Family Mart or others to sell most over-the-counter drugs, so long as they have a clerk who has registered and qualified with the local government. The fact that they no longer need a pharmacist is a big cost-saving difference from before, that also allows a big new income stream for the conbinis. -- Rick Cogley
tags: resident, snapjapan, snap!japan, rick cogley, otc, pal, mhlw

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Artist Josh George's Cool Album Art

2009-06-06T18:09:00.001+09:00

I bought the Pat Metheny Trio's "Day Trip" album and "Tokyo Day Trip" EP today, and really loved the album art. It's by New York-based artist Josh George, and if you click through to the image in this post that I uploaded to Flickr, you can see my annotations of the Japanese in his art. There's even "Cat Metheny" in there, too. Check out Josh's website or blog, and then go buy some of his art.

So how's the music? The Pat Metheny Trio with Pat on guitar (what else?), Christian McBride on bass, and Antonio Sanchez on drums is stellar. If you're a jazz fan you're sure to love it.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-06-01T01:28:00.001+09:00

Rickie Lee Jones: Interview about The Magazine
Interesting in-depth interview of Rickie Lee Jones in Musician, about her wonderful album The Magazine. -- Rick Cogley || The first reason I called it The Magazine was because the opening line of the song, the first lyric bit that came to me-"Homeboys calling from the corners, station to station, for the magazine..." That line was so important, because in terms of mood it set up everything that was about to happen. Homeboys is a street community drug term; homeboys are lookouts on the corners, and the magazine was the type of dope that they sold. But that's not what it was when I wrote it. It wasn't these guys on the corner, selling drugs. It became the poetry of hope. The words continue: "but her pages are turning out the lights in the windows," so immediately I made the song something else, something less down and out, more forward looking.
tags: rickie lee jones, the magazine, interview, musician
Purposeful mispronunciation of Sotomayor - Bitch Ph.D.
Loved this rant by M. LeBlanc on Bitch Ph.D. about purposefully mispronouncing Sotomayor. -- Rick Cogley || From the site: The idea that your name is somehow the property or the business of others, and that not only should they not be required to pronounce it correctly, they should purposely pronounce it incorrectly is one of the more brow-furrowing and staggering assertions I've heard come out of a conservative in months. It would be one thing if Krikorian was complaining about people getting lambasted for pronouncing it incorrectly, but he's not. What he's saying is that, despite knowing how to pronounce it correctly, people should nevertheless say it in a way that sounds wrong to the bearer of the name because to pronounce it correctly would be displaying too much "adapting to the newcomer."
tags: bitchphd, sotomayor, rant, mispronounce
blog:Cogley - Restoring Mail but not via Mobile Me
So much for MobileMe backing up my Mail account data! I had a another weird crash, which has been plaguing me since I upgraded OS X Leopard to 10.5.7. The crash happens when I wake the computer from sleep, and plug in my firewire then USB hard drives. When the USB hits the socket, sometimes I get the grey screen of death, in which the only way to recover is a hard reset. This happened again today, but this time, the hard reset broke Mail. After booting up, I started Mail and the only account I had was my MobileMe account. My Google accounts were gone. I thought, ah hah!, I'll recover from MobileMe's copies of my Mail Accounts. No dice. It must have quickly pushed to MobileMe, the change that happened when the system crashed, so syncing MobileMe did nothing to recover. Searching the web a little, I found various information about restoring the entire mail folder and so on, but it turned out that my mail data, in ~/Library/Mail, seemed intact. So, I decided to try to restore my Mail plist file first, from Time Machine backup, and see if that would fix the problem. Here's how to restore it...
tags: cogley, rick cogley, time machine, mail.app, mail, mobileme, account
Zany Bike Designs at Gizmodo
More insane, zany bike designs, c/o Tom - Rick Cogley || From the site: Designers with a deathwish are pushing the boundaries of bicycle design far beyond the realm of practicality into preposterous new worlds. The following 10 bikes are some of the most outrageous concepts to spring forth from this movement, and should only be operated in a controlled environment by stuntmen and circus folk.
tags: gizmodo, juicerhub, bikes, cycling, diy
Photo Essay: 20 of the Freakiest Custom Bikes on the Road
My brother Tom sent me this wonderful photo essay of the freakiest bikes on the planet! Awesome! -- Rick Cogley || From the site: Tall bikes, choppers, cargo bikes, freak bikes, art bikes, clown bikes…much more than just two wheels, two pedals, and a chain.
tags: freakiest, matadorlife.com, photo, essay, bikes, cycling, diy
Kaki King rocks out to "Pink Noise" | Video on TED.com
Wow, Kaki King is quite the guitarist! -- Rick Cogley || From the site: Kaki King, the first female on Rolling Stone's "guitar god" list, rocks out to a full live set at TED2008, including her breakout single, "Playing with Pink Noise." Jaw-dropping virtuosity meets a guitar technique that truly stands out.
tags: ted.com, kaki king, infinity, playing with pink noise
LibriVox » about LibriVox
LibriVox is a useful service that makes recordings of public domain books available via PodCast or download. -- Rick Cogley || From the site: What We Do - LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net for free. All our audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish. Volunteering for LibriVox is easy and does not require any experience with recording or audio engineering or acting or public speaking. All you need is a computer, some free recording software, and your own voice. We accept all volunteers in all languages, with all kinds of accents. You don’t need to audition or send us samples. We’ll accept you no matter what you sound like. We operate almost exclusively through Internet communications on our forum, where all your questions will be answered by our friendly community. We have a flat structure, designed to let people do just what they want to do. For more detailed information, see our FAQ. We’d like your help. Click to learn about volunteering for LibriVox.
tags: librivox, public, domain, podcast, books, recordings
If you want to succeed, don’t tell anyone. | Psychology Today Blogs
Interesting article about the reverse psychology involved in failing at someone if you tell people you'll do it. I've believed this for years. -- Rick Cogley || From the site: They suggest that when people announce an intention to commit to an identity goal in public, that announcement may actually backfire. Imagine, for example, that Mary wants to become a Psychologist. She tells Herb that she wants to pursue this career and that she is going to study hard in her classes. However, just by telling Herb her intention, she knows that Herb is already starting to think of her as a Psychologist. So, she has achieved part of her identity goal just by telling Herb about it. Oddly enough, that can actually decrease the likelihood that Mary will study hard.
tags: succeed, psychology, today, reverse
Photo from WikiPedia Commons - Death Valley Milkyway
This is the milkyway as seen from death valley.
tags: deathvalleysky_nps_big, 4000x1290, death, valley, milky, way
Browseology
The catch phrase says it: "Real time collaborative shopping with friends".
tags: browseology
Hysterical: Roger McNamee and Jon Rubinstein on the Palm Pre | AllThingsD
A hysterical video describing the benefits of the Palm Pre. Worth your time! :-D -- Rick Cogley || What can the Palm Pre really do? Watch Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee figure out the right marketing message for the Pre. Published on 5/28/2009
tags: allthingsd, Roger McNamee, Jon Rubinstein, Palm Pre, Video
Moblin v2.0 beta for Netbooks and Nettops - It's here... | moblin.org
Moblin v2.0 Beta makes me want to buy a netbook! -- Rick Cogley || From the site: * New, visually rich user experience, optimized for Netbook and Nettops, building on the latest open source graphics technology, such as Clutter, DRI2, and KMS. The user experience is provided mainly through the toolbar and panels, available at the top of the screen. * The m_zone, acting as the 'home screen' panel. It provides instant access to your synchronized calendar, tasks, appointments, recently used files, and real-time updates from your friends on social networking sites. * Aggregation of your social networking content. This provides you with the ability to see your social networking activities on one screen, easily interact with your friends, and update your status and site information. Twitter and Last.fm are the currently supported social networking sites, with more to come. * A web browser optimized for the Moblin 2.0 Netbook user interface. Based on the latest Mozilla browser technology revised into a Clutter shell, the browser gives you access to the whole internet, as well as advanced features, such as video embedding and the latest Flash plug-in, while integrating seamlessly into the user interface. * A 'Zoomable' media player. This player brings your media collection to life as you zoom from viewing all media down to focusing on an individual picture, movie, or audio track. The media player can detect and index media on external USB devices, as well as UPnP devices on your network. * A user interface for connection management and an updated connection manager (ConnMan). * And, of course, support for Linux desktop applications. Moblin is built using GNOME Mobile Technologies and supports existing Linux desktop applications. From here on out, we will focus on performance, bug fixing, fine tuning, and polishing. We post beta builds weekly in the download area. Moblin images should work on Intel based Netbooks and Nettops, we've been testing with the following platforms: Acer Aspire*One,
tags: moblin.org, nettops
Squared 5 - MPEG Streamclip video converter for Mac and Windows
If you need to convert AVI files to MOV (i.e. something authorable in Final Cut or iMovie), you can use MPEG Streamclip from Squared5. -- Rick Cogley || From the site: MPEG Streamclip is a powerful free video converter, player, editor for Mac and Windows. It can play many movie files, not only MPEGs; it can convert MPEG files between muxed/demuxed formats for authoring; it can encode movies to many formats, including iPod; it can cut, trim and join movies. MPEG Streamclip can also download videos from YouTube and Google by entering the page URL. You can use MPEG Streamclip to open and play most movie formats including MPEG files or transport streams; edit them with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Trim; set In/Out points and convert them into muxed or demuxed files, or export them to QuickTime, AVI, DV and MPEG-4 files with more than professional quality, so you can easily import them in a DVD authoring tool, and use them with many other applications or devices. Supported input formats: MPEG, VOB, PS, M2P, MOD, VRO, DAT, MOV, DV, AVI, MP4, TS, M2T, MMV, REC, VID, AVR, M2V, M1V, MPV, AIFF, M1A, MP2, MPA, AC3, ...
tags: converter, software, mpeg, mac, tools, convert, osx, ipod, squared5.com, streamclip
mophie - Juice Pack air for iPhone 3G
I need to get this cover-cum-battery-pack for my iPhone. Cool-looking product that seems to be sold out! -- Rick Cogley || From the site: The juice pack air™ is a rechargeable external battery concealed inside of a protective form-fitting case for the iPhone 3G. It offers you the full protection of a hard-shell case while providing virtually twice the battery life of the iPhone alone; all in an ultra-thin, light-weight, low-profile design. • The world’s thinnest Apple certified “Works With iPhone” external battery for iPhone 3G! • Rechargeable 1200mAh lithium polymer battery virtually doubles your time to rock, talk, surf and send. • Pass-through USB charging and sync with iTunes • Extended smart battery and full case protection • On/Off switch offers choice of battery or case • Integrated 4 LED charge status indicator
tags: mophie, juice pack air, iphone, 3g
Linpus set to debut first Moblin 2.0 distribution for end users
This mobile linux "moblin" from Linpus makes me want to buy a netbook! -- Rick Cogley || From the site: While we've been getting a pretty good look at Moblin 2.0 as of late, we haven't been hearing much about the end-user distributions that'll actually be winding up on netbooks and nettops as the Linux-based OS moves out of beta. Linpus now looks set to change that, however, with it announcing that it'll be showing off a Moblin version of its Linpus Linux Lite OS at Computex next week, which is apparently the first such end-user distribution to emerge. What's more, while the initial batch of screenshots don't exactly offer many surprises, Linpus says that it has indeed put its own touch on the interface, and that it's version will boot in just 15 seconds and give users access to a live desktop that'll let them quickly access a range of websites and applications. Not many more details beyond that, unfortunately, but we're sure this is just beginning of Moblin talk that'll emerge out of Computex.
tags: linpus, moblin, mobile, linux, netbook, engadget
A Grand Exposition for Yokohama’s 150th Year - Official WebSite
One hundred and fifty years after the opening of the port of Yokohama, the city is putting on the "Y+150" exposition, a series of events from 18 April to 29 Sept, 2009. -- Rick Cogley From the site: Theme Events Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Opening of the Port of Yokohama A Grand Exposition for Yokohama’s 150th Year Experience 150 years of Yokohama at our grand exposition celebrating the past and the future. A full program of events will be held to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the 1859 opening of the Port, based on three themes that are the lifeblood of Yokohama − the sea, the city and nature.
tags: yokohama, 150th, y+150, perry
It's time for the FTC to investigate Mac security | Security | Macworld
Ira Winkler's interesting article on why the FTC should investigate apple's security claims in regard to security. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: I have come to the conclusion that either the FTC must investigate Apple’s advertising claims with regard to security, or people must begin releasing proof-of-concept code on a regular basis. European Union and Canadian regulators can certainly step in as well. With Apple selling more Macs, its attitude is putting more people at risk. And just to be clear, it is not that Apple’s software has security vulnerabilities that is the problem; all commercial software does. The problem is that Apple is grossly misleading people to believe otherwise.
tags: ftc, ira, winkler, Internet, security, apple, investigate
The Video Shell Oil Desperately Doesn't Want You to See | Take Action | AlterNet
Thought-provoking article and video about Royal Dutch Shell oil working with the Nigerian military to oppress the Ogoni. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: For over thirteen years, multinational oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has done everything in its power to stop a trial from taking place at which the company must answer to charges that it colluded with the Nigerian military to commit serious human rights abuses to quell peaceful resistance to its operations in the Niger Delta region called Ogoni, including conspiring to bring about the conviction and execution of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his colleagues.
tags: alternet, ogoni, nigeria, niger, delta, ken, saro-wiwa, shell
TEDxTOKYO site
The TEDxTokyo site.
tags: tedxtokyo
About "TED" | Technology, Entertainment, Design
TED sounds like quite an interesting organization. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).
tags: technology, ted, design, innovation, ideas, creativity, talks, activism
Automating Twitter via OS X Automator | Mac OS X | Macworld
Use OS X's Automator to automatically send Twitter status updates.
tags: twitter, automator, status, update, automated, automatic
Consumer Videocam DIY Mic Wind Cover 家庭用ビデオカメラの「風雑音」防止小物の試作 - スキー大好き「TV業界・音声オジさん」のブログ
A Japanese site that has instructions on how to make a DIY wind cover for a flush-mount mic. -- Rick Cogley
tags: スキー大好き, 風雑音, tv業界, wind, noise, cover, fur, videocam, camcorder, mic
TechCorner » Migrating New Blogger to WordPress 2
Another post on migrating from New Blogger to Wordpress 2. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Import your posts with comments from New Blogger to WordPress 2. New Blogger Import tool is ease and simple to use; no more manual pains.
tags: techcorner, blogger, wordpress, migrate
Case Study: Moving a Business Blog from Blogger to WordPress | Small Business Trends
Post describing why Small Business Trends made the migration from Blogger to Wordpress. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Small Business Trends started out using Blogger software. In the summer of 2003 when I was first experimenting with blogging, Blogger was one of the better options. It was simple to set up and use. Both the software and hosting were free. And with Blogger having been acquired by Google earlier that year, my business intuition told me it might be an advantage for getting the site indexed and ranked in Google. Blogger seemed like a deal I could not refuse.
tags: wordpress, blogger, migration, smallbiztrends
Moving from Blogger to WordPress: Best Practices - jotsheet
Another blogger-to-wordpress migration plan. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: I recently moved a friend’s medium-size blog from Blogger to hosted WordPress (on DreamHost, not WordPress.com), and I thought I’d share a few tips for making the transition smooth.
tags: wordpress, blogger, blogging, blog, jotsheet, web
The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress | MamaBlogga
Good guide to migrating from Google's blogger platform to self-hosted Wordpress. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: I made the move from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress more than a year and a half ago. At the time, I wrote the original ultimate guide to migrating, but a few things have changed in the intervening months. So I present the fully updated, all new, ultimate guide to migrating from Blogger to WordPress!
tags: mamablogga, wordpress, blogger, migration

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Restoring Mail, but not via MobileMe Account Backups

2009-05-31T01:56:00.001+09:00

So much for MobileMe backing up my Mail account data! I had a another weird crash, which has been plaguing me since I upgraded OS X Leopard to 10.5.7. The crash happens when I wake the computer from sleep, and plug in my firewire then USB hard drives. When the USB hits the socket, sometimes I get the grey screen of death, in which the only way to recover is a hard reset. This happened again today, but this time, the hard reset broke Mail. After booting up, I started Mail and the only account I had was my MobileMe account. My Google accounts were gone.

I thought, ah hah!, I'll recover from MobileMe's copies of my Mail Accounts. No dice. It must have quickly pushed to MobileMe, the change that happened when the system crashed, so syncing MobileMe did nothing to recover. Searching the web a little, I found various information about restoring the entire mail folder and so on, but it turned out that my mail data, in ~/Library/Mail, seemed intact. So, I decided to try to restore my Mail plist file first, from Time Machine backup, and see if that would fix the problem.

How to Restore Mail.app

Here's how I restored it:

Close Mail.

Plug in the Time Machine drive.

Press option while clicking the Time Machine icon in the menu bar, select "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" and choose your Time Machine disk. You can display this icon in Time Machine preferences. Note, if you use Path Finder, a Finder replacement, like I do, start Finder before you do any Time Machine work.

Enter Time Machine, and find your last Mail plist backup. In Time Machine, just click a folder or two "back", and see what the date on the file is. The file is ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist where ~ is your home folder.

Affirm the overwrite, when the restore process asks if you want to replace the file with an older version.

Start Mail.

This worked. All my mail was present and accounted for. If my mail had been damaged, I could do the same procedure, but after stopping Mail, just rename the Mail folder ~/Library/Mail to something else like ~/Library/Mail-Backup, and restore both the Mail folder and the plist file from your Time Machine backup. It will take quite a bit longer to achieve, but it should work.

I hope this helps someone. Enjoy, and good luck recovering.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-05-25T01:29:00.001+09:00

Informative Site on Bicycle Lighting Systems
A very informative site on bike lighting systems. With nudity, lol. -- Rick Cogley From the site: Not everyone can afford to buy a commercially manufactured, very bright rechargeable lighting system, which Ken Kifer accurately describes as the best light for commuters. While prices have come down, a good rechargeable lighting system is still over $100 when you add in a good tail light. Adequate dynamo powered lights will cost you over $350 in the U.S. (6 watt dynamo plus front and rear lamp). A lot of people settle for less expensive 3 watt generator light sets which are not suitable for commuting, at least in the U.S.. Others buy el-cheapo handlebar mount lights which are not very bright, and usually not very reliable. This site describes how to build a high performance, rechargeable. lighting system without spending a lot of money. You can spend as little as $40 to construct a system, complete with a sealed beam headlamp, xenon strobe tail light, rechargeable battery, and charger. All components are available from retail or mail-order stores. I don't sell anything (except Flash Flags), this is purely an informational site. This site contains my informed opinions, as well as the views of other groups and individuals. There are many different solutions for bicycle lighting that meet the criteria of "seeing and being seen," and there are many solutions that do not meet these criteria. Choose wisely and use common sense. You don't have to spend hundreds of dollars for an adequate lighting system. A lighting system is not rocket science, it's basically connecting a battery to some lamps. The challenge is in sourcing the proper components and mounting them to the bicycle in a secure and reliable manner.
tags: starlight, nordicgroup, lighting, cycling
YPK Innovations Cafe 2.0 4-D116
I got a new YPK bike lock, that allows you to lock front and rear wheels simultaneously. My last YPK's plastic housing degraded and broke, and the steel collar around the hole in the lock that the sliding post goes into started to rotate, making it hard to lock. This new one seems to be upgraded - heavier-duty plastic around the lock itself.
tags: 4-d116, ypkinnovations, bike-lock, lock, cafe 2.0
Snap!Japan - Salaryman Haiku Winners
Dai-ichi Life Insurance has announced their latest Sarariiman Senryuu (Salaried Worker Senryuu, サラリーマン川柳) competition winners. It's the 22nd year for the competition, and people vote on the best humorous haiku that come from the daily life of salaried workers and the news. You may recall that haiku are the poems with a cadence of 5, 7 then 5 syllables. Check some of the sara-sen winners out with my translations. -- Rick Cogley
tags: sarasen, salaried, worker, dai-ichi, life, insurance
Avoid Looking Like an American Tourist | ReasonPad
Careful. This site reasonpad dot com is indicated by Safari and Google as being infected with malware. -- Rick == Interesting list of dos and don'ts for the loud, obnoxious American tourist. Funny, but I think difficult for most Americans to follow. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: As an American traveling in a foreign country, the last thing you want to do is stand out like a sore thumb. Not only do you have a greater chance of getting sucked into tourist traps, but you’re also a more obvious target for getting mugged or even kidnapped. So, are you aware of the things you do, say, and wear that make you look like the stereotypical tourist?
tags: reasonpad, american, tourist, tips
15 Terminal commands to supercharge OS X | News | TechRadar UK
TechRadar UK's favorite terminal commands for OS X. Long live CLI. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Although you can replicate the results or functionality offered by most Terminal commands via various bits of freeware and shareware, it's simpler to fire up the command line and paste in a handy command. Below are our favourites, centring on workflow efficiency and system streamlining and improvements. Note that if Terminal becomes a mess at any point, 'clear' removes everything from the current window or tab.
tags: techradar, terminal, osx
Wolfram|Alpha
New Search Engine Wolfram Alpha is interesting but not quite ready for prime time. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Making the world's knowledge computable - Today's Wolfram|Alpha is the first step in an ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone. You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.
tags: search, semanticweb, knowledge, engine, wolfram, alpha, searchengine, search engine
Camper.rb, a ruby script to link Campfire to Jabber - SuperJared.com
Campfire to Jabber proxy script written in ruby. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: At work we use 37signals’ Campfire group chat for our office discussions, as well as customer support. This web-based chat is great for teams to intercommunicate as well as keep the channel open for our customers to speak with us. However, I am not a fan of keeping a couple tabs open to the same pages all day. One reason is that it becomes a RAM hog after a few hours. It also adds another chat program to the list that I have open.
tags: superjared, ruby, camper.rb
Do you Poken?
Cool cellphone-strap gadget that lets you connect by exchanging SNS info via your "poken". -- Rick Cogley | From the site: With your poken you instantly connect with new friends across online social networks when and where you meet them.
tags: poken, do you poken, social network
Sheldon Brown-Bicycle Technical Information
An amazing and encyclopedic body of knowledge about cycling and bicycles. Sheldon Brown's site. -- Rick Cogley
tags: cycling, bike, bicycle, reference, sheldon, brown

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

New YPK Innovations Lock

2009-05-24T12:39:00.001+09:00

I got a new bike lock from YPK Innovations - a Cafe 2.0. The model I bought has a more flexible and just slightly lighter cable than the last, as well as much harder, more durable-seeming plastic around the lock. I like it better.

There were two problems with the old one, that cropped up after 18 months of daily, outdoor use at the train station:

The plastic bezel around the lock broke, exposing the metal lock.

The metal collar inside, around the lock itself started to rotate, covering up the hole that the post was supposed to be inserted into.

Here are photos of the problem:

I think the one I just bought is a generation old, but it still seems better than the first one. These YPK "cafe" locks are nice because you can make two loops for flexible locking.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-05-18T01:28:00.001+09:00

Saboten no Hana Lyrics - Kazuo Zaitsu
Kazuo Zaitsu (kanji: 財津和夫) of the Japanese band Tulip, is the singer of a favorite song of mine, "Saboten no Hana" or The Cactus Flower, which is a song about hope despite love lost. It was the theme song of an enormously popular 1993 drama called "Hitotsu Yane no Shita" or Under One Roof. Zaitsu san has a unique and pleasant voice that I like, and this song always brings a tear to my eye. The song features a simple piano solo in the bass register, which to me is the man's sad voice mixed with hope. I thought I'd translate the lyrics so others could understand it too. You can see Zaitsu san sing it and see some stills from the drama on YouTube. -- Rick Cogley
tags: kazuo zaitsu, saboten no hana, hitotsu yane no shita, lyrics, drama, japan
Best Tokyo Subway Map: Vollmer Design
Vollmer Design's superior map of the Tokyo rail and subway system is a must for any visitor to or resident of Tokyo. The map is printed on A3 paper, but is folded small to the size of "3 x 1 2/3 matches" according to the nicely-designed Informa website where the map is available. Very affordable, even inexpensive, at JPY 270 yen online, it's less than the cost of a Starbucks latte, or maybe a typical iPhone app. The map is thankfully bilingual, so a visitor can show it to a Japanese speaker and get help, while reading the romanized versions of the names. It also has clear icon markers of major tourist sites like the Tsukiji Fish Market near Ginza, and the Tokyo Tower. -- Rick Cogley
tags: vollmer design, tokyo, map, subway, informa
http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com
Just like the URL says: these are awkward family photos. Really, really awkward!
tags: awkwardfamilyphotos.com, funny, family
Mobile Opportunity: A quick history of software platforms: How we got here, and where we're going
An excellent article on software platforms, by Michael Mace. -- Rick Cogley | From the article: Intuit and Stanford recently asked me to give talks on computer platforms and what makes them successful. (By platforms I mean software with APIs that third party developers can write apps on top of; Windows and Macintosh are both platforms, as is Java.) Platforms are a hot topic in Silicon Valley these days. The success of the iPhone app store in mobile, and Facebook on the web, have forcefully reminded people that you can grow a tech business more quickly if you get third party developers to help you. Almost every tech company I work with is trying to expose some sort of API or platform offering in its products.
tags: michael mace, mobileopportunity, software, platforms
Disco - Mac Disc Burning
"Drag, Drop, Disco." Good alternative to Toast for disc burning.
tags: software, osx, mac, burning, cd, tools, disc
blog:Cogley - Disc Media Burning with "Disco", a Toast Alternative
Disco is a polished, inexpensive (USD 29.95, currently 10 dollars off as of 13 May 2009) alternative to Toast Titanium. I've had mixed results with Toast, and did not want to pay the upgrade fee, so I started looking for alternatives. I've done a few burns in Disco so far, and it seems to work quite well. No problems or "coasters" yet, at this time.
tags: disco, media, burn, discoapp.com, toast, cd, dvd
blog:Cogley - Collapsing All Folders in Path Finder
I could not find this information in the help file or on the CocoaTech forum. If you use CocoaTech's Path Finder, the Finder replacement that has a lot of extra functionality that is missing in the normal OS X Finder, you may be browsing around in a folder with many subfolders, and wish to somehow "collapse" the folders you opened, to clean up the view. Clicking the disclosure triangle of 100 open subfolders is rather tedious, so isn't there an easier way? I stumbled on a method. Here it is.
tags: path finder, cocoatech, collapse, folders
blog:Cogley - Updating Leopard OS X 10.5.6 to 10.5.7
I updated my MacBook Pro's OS X from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 today, and there was a little hiccup. Here's what happened.
tags: apple, leopard, osx, update, 10.5.7
Snap!Japan - RIP Kiyoshiro Imawano - translation of "ameagari no yozora ni"
Kiyoshiro Imawano, the hugely-popular lead singer of RC Succession died of lymphatic disease at the age of 59. He'll be dearly missed. One of their hits, "Ameagari no Yozora ni" is representative of his music, and you can hear it on YouTube. I thought I'd translate the lyrics to it. The original Japanese is followed by romanized Japanese, followed by my English approximation. It's full of double-meanings, of course.
tags: Kiyoshiro Imawano, ameagari no yozora ni, rock
blog:Cogley - Migrating User Folders on OS X Leopard Server
I did an experiment on my test Leopard Server to migrate User Folders from the default /Users to another direct-attached volume based on some questions that came up. The problem is, OS X Leopard Server defaults to using the system disk as the Users partition, and this disk is not often your largest disk. It can fill up quickly if users start storing their photos or music. Long story short, the trick is to use Workgroup manager to auto-create the User directories, but, before that there's some things you need to do for prep.
tags: osx, leopard, server, user, folder, migrate
blog:Cogley - Does my Mac's SuperDrive do Dual Layer
If you are wondering whether the SuperDrive in your Mac is dual-layer capable, or whether it can store 8+ GB of data on a data DVD rather than 4+ GB, have a look at the System Profiler app (you can Spotlight it to easily find it if you use Leopard), and check Hardware, Disc Burning, DVD-Write. If you see the tell-tale DLs in the description, you're good to go. Just buy the appropriate media.
tags: superdrive, osx, dual-layer, DL, system profiler
StillTasty: Your Ultimate Shelf Life Guide - Save Money, Eat Better, Help The Environment
StillTasty.com is a very useful Web site that lets you check the shelf life of common foods and ingredients. Know your "best before" from your "expires on". Searchable database, and various tips. www.stilltasty.com
tags: food, cooking, health, reference, safety, drink, stilltasty, Cocina

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Disc Burnin' with Disco

2009-05-13T19:29:00.001+09:00

Disco is a polished, inexpensive (USD 29.95, currently 10 dollars off as of 13 May 2009) alternative to Toast Titanium. I've had mixed results with Toast, and did not want to pay the upgrade fee, so I started looking for alternatives. I've done a few burns in Disco so far, and it seems to work quite well. No problems or "coasters" yet, at this time.

Here's some highlights:

Disco supports spanning of a backup set to multiple discs, and lets you know how many discs you will need to complete the backup. Very convenient, and you just feed it the disc media when prompted, while it works.

Disco stores a discography for created media or disc images, so you can easily search for files on your media.

Straightforward workflow, assisted by what the publisher calls "Crossroads" technology. It's unnoticeable, and I had no problems following, so in a way I guess it works!

Creation of CDs or DVDs with Hybrid, HFS+, UDF, PC Joliet, or ISO 9660 file systems, which means you'll be able to read the media most anywhere.

Burn to all Apple-supported in- and external drives, and enjoy CD multi-session support, burn and erase for rewritable media, and support for dual-layer DVDs.

If your audio is supported by Quicktime, you can create an audio CD or easily switch to a MP3 data CD. Also, you can drag-and-drop to change track order.

You can create disc images from files and discs in the CDR, ISO or DMG formats, as well as create CDs from ISO, DMG, IMG or CUE/BIN.

Oh, I almost forgot that it "smokes" when you burn, provided a new-enough Mac. Pretty cool effect!

Assessment after Some Usage

I used Disco for a few burns (the demo allows you 7, gratis), and I found the program to be a tag buggy here and there. There's times where restarting Disco will help it detect discs, or, where it mis-detects the burner you want to use. I have a San Disk Cruzer USB stick, which for some reason Disco thinks is a burner, and it gets "stuck" on it until I go into Disco Preferences and change it.

Path Finder - Collapsing All Folders

2009-05-13T16:33:00.001+09:00

I could not find this information in the help file or on the CocoaTech forum. If you use CocoaTech's Path Finder, the Finder replacement that has a lot of extra functionality that is missing in the normal OS X Finder, you may be browsing around in a folder with many subfolders, and wish to somehow "collapse" the folders you opened, to clean up the view.

Clicking the disclosure triangle of 100 open subfolders is rather tedious, so isn't there an easier way? I stumbled on a method. Here it is.

How to Collapse All Subfolders in Path Finder

In list view, select all. Command-A.

Press Option-Left Arrow.

Sit back, amused, but don't do anything boneheaded like pressing Command-Delete.

And voila! Collapsed folders.

Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.7 Update

2009-05-13T10:39:00.001+09:00

I updated my MacBook Pro's OS X from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7 today, and there was a little hiccup. Here's what happened, but see UPDATES below:

I noticed there was an update available, so I shut down all the user applications and things like ExpanDrive and Plaxo, then tried Software Update from the Apple menu. Software update started to work, then stalled at around 150 MB of 450 MB downloaded, claiming to take another 8 hours to download. It's not my ISP because everything else is fine. Everyone must be hitting the server at once. Stopped the update during the download.

Intending to use the "combo updater", which is just the full update download, I found the update on Apple's download site. There are two updaters: the Delta Updater, and the Combo Updater. The 450+ MB Delta is just labeled as "Update" and is for updating from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7. The 700+ MB Combo is for any 10.5, to 10.5.7. Decided to try the Delta.

Apple Installer offers to run the updater when it downloads, so I chose to do that. It seemed to work, then offered to Restart so I did that.

After the restart, the process froze on a blue screen with a mouse pointer.

I force restarted, then after the restart, the system auto-rebooted.

After the second restart, the expected normal grey Apple Logo screen with the progress spinner appeared. It took a long time, but it finally came to the login screen, and login was normal.

I confirmed that the system did indeed it had been upgraded, by checking Apple menu, About this Mac. It's indeed updated to 10.5.7.

When I started Mail and iCal after the upgrade, there were no "please wait while we update your database" type of messages, as there have been in the past when Apple has made database changes to these applications.

I'm going to do an OnyX run, to clean things up and reset permissions and so on as a matter of maintenance, and I'll report back here if there are any other problems related to the update.

UPDATES

13 May 2009, 23:55 - the system worked snappily all day, but this evening I got the grey kernel crash screen. The "You need to restart" in multiple languages one. Ugh. Apparently, Apple recognizes the problem and will issue a fix. Recommend waiting.

14 May 2009, 11:41

The 10.5.7 update is definitely much snappier. A lot of things are running very fast. This is nice. Now, just don't crash on me again, please!

15 May 2009, 10:30

Crashed after waking from sleep. Had to force reset. System worked well after that.

16 May 2009, 9:30

Flock crashed and could not be force-quit. Activity Monitor would not start. Terminal kill command would not kill.

What's in the 10.5.7 Update

FYI, here's what Apple says is in the update:

Address Book

• Improves reliability of Address Book syncing with iPhone and other devices and applications.

AirPort

• Improves the reliability of AirPort connections, including improvements when roaming in large wireless networks with an Intel-based Mac.

Client management

• Improves reliability of synchronizing files on a portable home directory.

• Fixes an issue in Mac OS X 10.5.4 and 10.5.5 in which managed users may not see printers that use the Generic PPD.

• Client computers that use UUID-based ByHost preferences now respect managed Screen Saver settings.

iChat

• Addresses an issue that could cause an encryption alert to appear in the chat window.

• Setting your iChat status to "invisible" via AppleScript no longer logs you out of iChat.

• Resolves an issue in which pasting text from a Microsoft Office document could insert an image rather than text.

Graphics

• Includes general improvements to gaming performance.

• Includes graphics improvements for iChat, Cover Flow, Aperture, and iTunes.

• Includes fixes for possible graphics distortion issues with certain ATI graphics cards.

Mail

• Includes overall performance and reliability fixes.

• Improves Connection Doctor accuracy.

• Fixes an issue that could cause messages identified as junk to remain in the inbox.

• Fixes an issue that could cause Mail to append a character to the file extension of an attachment.

• Addresses an issue that could prevent Mail from quitting.

• Improves reliability when printing PDF attachments.

MobileMe

• Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com.

Networking

• Improves Apple File Service performance, especially when using a home directory hosted on an AFP server. Important: If you are using Mac OS X 10.5.6 (client) to connect to a • • Mac OS X Server 10.4-based server, it is strongly recommended that you update the server to Mac OS X Server version 10.4.11.

• Improves the performance and reliability of TCP connections.

• Improves reliability and performance for AT&T 3G cards.

• Updates the ssh Terminal command for compatibility with more ssh servers.

Printing

• Improves printing for the Adobe CS3 application suite.

• Improves printing for USB-based Brother and Canon printers.

Parental Controls

• Addresses an issue in which a parentally-controlled account could be unable to access the iTunes Store.

• Includes general fixes for time limits.

• Resolves an issue that prevented adding allowed websites from Safari via drag and drop.

Time Machine

• Fixes issues that could cause Time Machine to state the backup volume could not be found.

• Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule.

Safari

• Improves compatibility with web proxy servers.

General

• Includes Mac OS X security improvements. See this website for more information.

• Addresses inaccuracies with Calculator when the Mac OS X language is set to German or Swiss German.

• Improves the performance and reliability of Chess.

• Improves DVD Player performance and reliability.

• Performance improvements for iCal are included.

• Fixes an issue when running the New iCal Events Automator action as an applet.

• Adds a Trackpad System Preference pane for portable Macs.

• Improves compatibility with smart cards such as the U.S. Department of Defense Common Access Card.

• Updates time zone data and Daylight Saving Time rules for several countries.

Mac OS X 10.5.7 is available via Software Update and also via standalone installers.

Does my SuperDrive do "dual-layer"?

2009-05-13T08:23:00.001+09:00

If you are wondering whether the SuperDrive in your Mac is dual-layer capable, or whether it can store 8+ GB of data on a data DVD rather than 4+ GB, have a look at the System Profiler app (you can Spotlight it to easily find it if you use Leopard), and check Hardware, Disc Burning, DVD-Write. If you see the tell-tale DLs in the description, you're good to go. Just buy the appropriate media.

The Human Body, Understood

2009-05-11T21:47:00.001+09:00

A random and very funny list circulating 'round the Internets. Understand your own body.

The Human Body

It takes your food seven seconds to get from your mouth to your stomach.

One human hair can support 3 kg (6.6 lb).

The average man's penis is three times the length of his thumb.

Human thighbones are stronger than concrete.

A woman's heart beats faster than a man's.

There are about one trillion bacteria on each of your feet.

Women blink twice as often as men.

The average person's skin weighs twice as much as the brain.

Your body uses 300 muscles to balance itself when you are standing still.

If saliva cannot dissolve something, you cannot taste it.

Women reading this will be finished now.

Men are still busy checking their thumbs.

Lol.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-05-11T01:28:00.001+09:00

Adjix URL Shortener
Adjix is an URL shortener that uses HTML redirects instead of 302's. From the site: Short Links. Tiny Ads. Big Payoff.
tags: adjix, twitter, short, url, tools, tinyurl, webservice, service, advertising
Building a URL Shortener
From the site: With all the talk of URL shortening services, I decided to add a quick service into Snook.ca, which is run on CakePHP, to redirect a short URL to a post. Because my static content already has short URLs and all I have are posts, creating a short URL handler for it was very easy.
tags: url shortener
Build Your Own Url Shortener For Free! | NetHackz
From the site: Build Your Own Url Shortener For Free! - URL shorteners are awesome. The less characters, the better! But what happens when that server goes down or some network issue prevents people from getting to your links? Nothing. Blank pages. Better yet, why would you want to brand someone elses domain name? Think about all the traffic and notoriety you’re giving tinyurl and is.gd? Can you use that same traffic to your advantage?
tags: url shortener

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-05-04T01:29:00.001+09:00

Snap!Japan - English Bookstores in Tokyo and Yokohama
My list of some English bookstores in Japan, but mostly in Tokyo or Yokohama where I live, for the visitor or resident.
tags: bookstores, tokyo, yokohama, kinokuniya, maruzen, yurindo
Snap!Japan - Social Media Acceptance in Japan
I agree that Social Networking Service acceptance, or lack thereof, is not a simple matter of Japanese being "shy". Just go to Shibuya, Harajuku, or Kabukicho to prove otherwise! I think SNS acceptance is driven by the marketing of the SNS, by whether it "feels right" and "fits right" for Japanese people, and by whether other people are using it. I think that's what Thierry is saying anyway, but my perspective is that SNS's like Mixi are Japanese to begin with and not a localized version of an application like Facebook or MySpace.
tags: sns, social media, thierry de baillon, mixi, facebook, rick cogley, snapjapan
blog:Cogley - Enable Color Managment in Flock or Firefox 3
Don't suffer with color management off. Turn it on now. If you use anything but IE 7 you are still out of luck, but Safari users have had this functionality for quite a while. I refer to "color management", which is the concept of adjusting the color properties of devices, like displays, monitors, printers or scanners, so that colors mean the same thing across devices, and more importantly look the same. The adjustment can be done in the operating system itself, which is what Mac OS X does (and one reason it is superior to Windows), or via International Color Consortium "ICC" profiles and other software trickery.
tags: flock, firefox 3, rick cogley, icc, color management

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Migrating User Folders in OS X Leopard Server

2009-05-02T09:34:00.001+09:00

I did an experiment on my test Leopard Server to migrate User Folders from the default /Users to another direct-attached volume based on some questions that came up.

The problem is, OS X Leopard Server defaults to using the system disk as the Users partition, and this disk is not often your largest disk. It can fill up quickly if users start storing their photos or music. Long story short, the trick is to use Workgroup manager to auto-create the User directories, but, before that there's some things you need to do for prep.

How to Migrate OS X Leopard Users Folder from Default to External

In Terminal, you can either sudo bash or use sudo in front of every command. I like to use sudo bash, but remember to exit out of your sudo'ed bash shell later, to avoid risk. Don't use sudo bash if you don't know your way around a Terminal. If you are not sure, don't use it, and just go for sudo in front of each command you want to use.

sudo bash
Password:

Create the containing Users folder on the external drive, which we'll call "EXTHD" here. You can confirm its POSIX permissions using ls -la.

cd /Volumes/EXTHD
mkdir Users
ls -la

Start Server Admin, select the server in the left-hand list, then select the File Sharing section from the toolbar. Copy down all the attributes of your existing Users folder Share Point, for example to auto-mount as "User home folders", protocol options to share via AFP, SMB, FTP or NFS, and base ACL and POSIX Permissions with whether to inherit or not.

Now, you can Unshare the Share Point in Server Admin. Click Unshare and Save. Click another Share Point to make the list refresh.

After you confirm the Users Share Point is gone you can create a new Users Share Point on /Volumes/EXTHD/Users, your external disk. Reset all the settings you wrote down for your original Users, then Propagate Permissions using the Gear dropdown.

Start Workgroup Manager, and specify the new User share for each user. Multi-select users, select your new share, and click "Create Home Now" to create.

Now you can migrate the contents, which is probably the most tedious part because there's unfortunately no automated way to do it. Use the mv command, and you may need to reset permissions after the move. Users can try connecting and accessing their files. Here's one way, which involves using the su command from root's shell to mimic any given user, in this case John Allen Smith or "jas".

bash-3.2# su - jas
mysrv:~ jas$ whoami
jas
mysrv:~ jas$ ls
Desktop Documents Downloads Library Movies Music Pictures Public Sites
mysrv:~ jas$ pwd
/Network/Servers/mysrv.mydomain.com/Volumes/EXTHD/Users/jas
mysrv:~ jas$ cd Documents/
mysrv:Documents jas$ ls
About Stacks.pdf
mysrv:Documents jas$ mv /Users/jas/Documents/* .
mv: ./myfile.txt: set owner/group (was: 1034/80): Operation not permitted

If you get errors like the "Operation not permitted" above, deal with those permissions separately. Use the exit command to exit to root again, and use it again to get out of the "sudo bash" root shell. I hope this helps get you started migrating user folders to an external hard drive, in OS X Leopard Server. Enjoy!

Color Management in Flock (and Firefox)

2009-04-29T18:44:00.001+09:00

If you use anything but IE 7 you are still out of luck, but Safari users have had this functionality for quite a while. I refer to "color management", which is the concept of adjusting the color properties of devices, like displays, monitors, printers or scanners, so that colors mean the same thing across devices, and more importantly look the same. The adjustment can be done in the operating system itself, which is what Mac OS X does (and one reason it is superior to Windows), or via International Color Consortium "ICC" profiles and other software trickery.

Let me keep it very simple for this post, though. If you use Flock, which is at the time of this writing based on Firefox 3, or Firefox 3 itself, color management is disabled by default. However, you can easily enable color management, so that photos on photo sharing sites like Flickr or SmugMug will render with the color profile embedded in the photo, which usually means they will look much better than the default, using no profile. In my opinion, these days you will get far better results by turning color management on, in your Flock or Firefox 3 browser.

How to Enable Color Management in Flock or Firefox 3

The easiest way to enable the settings is by using the Color Management Addon for Firefox which will work in Firefox and should work in Flock. Alternatively, you can enter the secret "about:config" code in your address bar (where you type the URL), and enable color management yourself:

about:config

Be very careful about what you change in here, because you can break your browser easily. That said, scroll down until you find:

gfx.color_management.enabled

gfx.color_management.display_profile

You can double click gfx.color_management.enabled to enable Firefox to use whatever profile is embedded in the photo you are viewing, and, you can specify an ICC profile by entering its path in the gfx.color_management.display_profile parameter. If you are not sure what that means, just enable gfx.color_management.enabled.

Restart Flock or Firefox, and you should get much better colors on sites like Flickr or SmugMug. Finally, please check out Deb Richardson's excellent introductory post on this topic, for a clear depiction of the difference of using profiles or not, and how different applications render color. Don't waste time with color management turned off - turn it on now and enjoy much richer color.

Flickr Video Now 500MB

2009-04-29T08:32:00.001+09:00

Flickr has increased their maximum video size from 150 MB to 500 MB for Pro members. How do these sites handle the continually expanding capacity needs? Flickr charges only 25 dollars per year for pro accounts so they must have scads of users.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-04-27T01:29:00.001+09:00

Camcorder Info - How We Test Camcorders - Reviews
Good site with CamCorder reviews. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: Exacting standards and the scientific method are at the heart of Camcorderinfo.com, and rest of the sites in the Reviewed.com network. We don't believe in the so-called "golden eye" or the "expert review board." Both of these methods allow too many opportunities for subjectivity and personal preference. Our objective, scientific analysis, in conjunction with our strict ethics policy, makes our reviews the fairest and most transparent online.
tags: camcorderinfo, testing, reviews
New Canon PowerShot D10 Point-and-Shoot - blog:Cogley
Yesterday, I purchased the new Canon PowerShot D10 to take over for an old Canon IXY 500. The IXY has served us well and works OK still, but the waterproof and shockproof nature of the D10 were attractive because of the proximity to the beach where we live, and how often we've been nervous about taking electronics to the beach! It's going to be nice to drag the camera right into the surf or even underwater.
tags: blogcogley, blog:cogley, canon, powershot, D10

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

New Canon PowerShot D10, a Waterproof Point-and-Shoot

2009-04-22T12:40:00.001+09:00

Yesterday, I purchased the new Canon PowerShot D10 at Yodobashi Camera in Shinjuku, Tokyo, to take over for an old Canon IXY 500. The IXY has served us well and works OK still, but the waterproof and shockproof nature of the D10 were attractive because of the proximity to the Shonan beach area near where we live, and how often we've been nervous about taking electronics to the beach! It's going to be nice to drag the camera right into the surf or even underwater.

I compared this D10 with other waterproof and shockproof models from Olympus (the Tough-8000) and Panasonic (the Lumix TS-1 or FS-1), but ultimately chose the Canon. I liked the way it felt in my hands at the store, and there were too many quirks in reviews about the others. At any rate, I thought I would share some first impressions and photos with everyone.

Specifications of the Canon PowerShot D10

Let me summarize some of the specs.

Megapixels - A solid 12.1, combined with the Digic4 processor. I'm not so interested in huge megapixel figures, because I really don't need to print posters.

Lens - it's got a bright f/2.8 3x optical, 4x digital zoom, with lens-shift Image Stabilization. This is a nice lens, and it's in line with the sensor and not "folded", which contributes to its rather bulbous shape.

Focus - face-detection auto-focus.

Media - "Secure Digital" SDHC format.

File Format - JPEG (Fine only, not Super-Fine) for photos and Motion JPEG for movies up to 1 hour and 4GB.

Toughness - it's an outdoor-use camera, waterproof to 10 m and shockproof to 1.2 m.

ISO - 80 to 1600 but pretty noisy at high ISO.

Viewfinder - none, it's an "LCD only" camera.

Battery - Lithium Ion

Unprocessed Samples from the Canon PowerShot D10

Here are some unprocessed sample photos, and a gratuitous motion JPEG video from the Canon PowerShot D10.

Impressions of the Canon PowerShot D10

I've only used the camera just for a few snaps, but I like it. It turns on very quickly, has a whole slew of "scene modes" like aquarium, beach, underwater, foliage and so forth, as well as a program mode for some manual tinkering as usual in the PowerShot range. It has a programmable print button, so you can for example link "video record" to that for an easy way to start recording without fishing through menus.

I don't care too much about the fashionable, replaceable faceplates that you can swap in (it has blue on there in the box but there's also black, orange and camoflage), but I really love the straps that came with the "Canon D10 Outdoor Kit". There's a wrist strap, a neck strap, a caribiner strap that you hook to your belt, and a shoulder strap that lets you sling the D10 over your shoulder, and whip up when you want to take a photo. The design of the camera itself is pretty funky, but each corner has a connector that looks like something you'd see in a submarine. These connectors make the straps really easy to connect. You just slot it in and turn. Easy! And since there's a connector on each corner, it's nice for left- or right-handed people.

As for negatives, despite the nice fast f/2.8 lens, Canon bastardized the JPEG settings so there's no "super fine". I suppose this is to try to prevent you from having to swap SD cards at the beach, but I'd rather make that decision myself. Also, there's no HD video like Canon's introduced into their newest IXY models. Something I noticed in the manual, it says to turn up the volume on any videos you take with the camera because the mic is "not so sensitive due to the waterproof characteristics of the camera." So say we all. Finally, I've owned other PowerShots but this one's manual settings feel a little limited.

In the end, I think I'm going to probably take this camera everywhere because I don't have to fret about damage from water. I like it quite a bit, especially the fact that I can sling it over my shoulder with the useful straps. I'll update when I get some samples underwater.

Updated Mac and Cycling FAQs

2009-04-16T14:36:00.001+09:00

I updated my Mac and Cycling FAQs. They are not comprehensive, but are a compilation of answers to questions that I wanted answers for when I started using a Mac and separately when I began cycling. Enjoy!

Splitting Long Videos for YouTube in iMovie

2009-04-12T19:03:00.001+09:00

iMovie, included among other excellent consumer applications in Apple's iLife 09, now provides an easy way to share your videos on Google's YouTube video sharing service. You just prep your video, and then use the Share menu to share it in various ways. However, YouTube has a 10 minute, 1GB limit.

Using iMovie 09 with YouTube

Here's a few tips to work with those YouTube limits:

Confirm the total video time at the bottom of the project window, and the length of a clip by hovering the mouse over the clip and looking at the time-stamp appearing at its beginning.

Use Share menu, YouTube. If the movie is over the YouTube limit, the dialog box that appears will tell you so.

Make a clip smaller by positioning the playhead, ctrl-clicking and selecting "Split Clip." Once clips are split you can delete parts that are not needed.

If need be, split up your Project into two Projects. Let's say you have a 14 minute, 600 MB AVI file you have imported into your project, that you have split into two 7 minute chunks. Ctrl-click on the Project in Project Library and choose Duplicate. Rename each project to indicate which half it will be in the end. Open each half and delete the unneeded half.

I trust someone will find this useful when working with iMovie and YouTube. Enjoy!

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-04-06T01:29:00.001+09:00

If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize - NYTimes.com
Loved this article on NetFlix' competition to improve their recommendation algorithm. -- Rick Cogley | From the site: THE “NAPOLEON DYNAMITE” problem is driving Len Bertoni crazy. Bertoni is a 51-year-old “semiretired” computer scientist who lives an hour outside Pittsburgh. In the spring of 2007, his sister-in-law e-mailed him an intriguing bit of news: Netflix, the Web-based DVD-rental company, was holding a contest to try to improve Cinematch, its “recommendation engine.” The prize: $1 million.
tags: nytimes, nytimes.com, napoleon dynamite, netflix, recommendation

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Rick's Picks (weekly)

2009-03-16T01:29:00.001+09:00

Bribes end up with sour just desserts? Snap!Japan - a long-term resident's perspective
Since the Lockheed scandal brought Kakuei Tanaka down in the late 1970's, Japan has seen many and varied incidents, their occurrence only escalating in recent years. Even the Tanaka protege Ichiro Ozawa, who has been stressing a (rather two-faced) populist agenda of late, is now tainted by a bribe scandal via a top aide accused of taking corporate donations. Ozawa san, so much for that "for the people" agenda eh? Who's going to replace Aso?! I like talking to just about anyone, and it's frequently the case that I find myself talking to a random taxi driver about something or other happening in Japan. The other day, during a conversation variously about Ozawa, bribes, the US Sarbanes Oxley legislation and "settai" (client entertainment) in Japan, my "over 60" year old driver told me he worked at Mizkan, the vinegar maker, for 40 years. I assume was his whole career, and he said he was in sales, in charge of large corporate accounts.
tags: bribe, snapjapan, snap!Japan, ozawa, tanaka, settai
blog:Cogley - Large Project Inequities
The thought that "no correctly-spec'ed project gets approved" leads me to lots of questions, and no real answers this morning. I was thinking about the massive projects that the world has seen, like the Pyramids, great Dams, Bridges, Skyscrapers and Railways, or well-designed and -architected cities in general, and wondering: Are these things we marvel at, built on great inequities? Inequities that people of certain demographics cannot even imagine (thinking about myself as a white, male, middle-class American). It's not comfortable to think about, but would such marvels even exist if there were not the exploited and the exploiters? Can this said to have been even necessary for technical progress?
tags: rick, cogley, rickcogley, project, pm, management, project management, inequities

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.