Category Archives: Apple

Adieu? Or Adeona?

What are the chances of getting your laptop back if it’s stolen? Pretty slim, probably. But you can at least improve the odds.

There are various utilities out there which, when installed on your machine, will call home from time to time. If somebody steals your machine and connects it to a network, you can then use information from these connections to help track it down.

I’ve created various home-brewed versions of these in the past but I guess a perfect utility would be:

  • not dependent on any one company
  • usable on multiple platforms
  • secure
  • open source
  • free

Ah! That would be Adeona you’d be wantin’, so it would.

More info here.

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Datacase

It’s fascinating to watch people discover new ways of using the iPhone/iTouch. The fun, I’m sure, is only just starting. It’s the first widely-deployed device that has a multi-touch interface. It’s the first mobile device with really good accelerometers in it. It’s the first thing you can drop easily into your pocket that has such a beautiful screen. It has good connectivity and location-based services. It’s really easy to install new applications. And, significantly, it’s the first to combine all of these with a sophisticated GUI and operating system.

Sometimes, though, it’s the simple things that can be the most useful. People have just started realising that you can make your phone into a fileserver on the local network, which means (a) you can transfer stuff to and from your phone without using iTunes if wanted, and (b) you can do it from any machine on the network, not just the one you normally sync with, and (c) you can also just ask your family or colleagues to drop files onto your phone. Do you remember how, in the old days, we would carry around memory sticks that had to be plugged in?

The application I’m playing with, DataCase, appears on your network as an AFP and FTP server, which means you can just open it in the Finder or in Windows, and, as an aside, it makes the contents available over HTTP. Yes, it’s a web server. And we’ve certainly only just started to imagine the full implications of carrying a web server in your pocket…

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Remotely Possible

One of the neatest apps to be released for the new iPhone/iTouch software is Apple’s Remote, which connects to a copy of iTunes running on a machine on your network and allows you to control it from the iPod.

This is great, but I seldom feel the need to control my computer from across the room. It lives in a very small study and, from across the room, I can reach the keyboard! I did, however, have an old Airport Express hanging about, and an idea occurred to me today… I plugged it into the back of my stereo downstairs:

and configured my iTunes upstairs to play through the Airport Express, and suddenly I had wireless control of my entire music collection at my fingertips.

But wait, it gets better… I found the Settings panel on the Remote application and it had grown a new feature: the ability to select the speakers you want to use:

So now, sitting on the sofa, I can browse my music located in another room, and send it to the big speakers in this one.

Very cool. Mmm… Those Airport Expresses on eBay start to look much more attractive…

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wget for Mac OS X Leopard

Three years ago I compiled a version of the ‘wget’ utility so that it would run under Mac OS X and uploaded it to Status-Q. It’s had an amazing number of downloads, and I felt it was probably time to update it!

So here is a shiny new wget.zip, which contains the following:

  • the wget binary
  • the wget.1 man page
  • the default wgetrc configuration file
  • A README file telling you a bit more.

The main changes from the original version are:

  • it’s a universal binary
  • it’s the latest version of wget (1.11.4)
  • it’s compiled on 10.5.4 and may possibly not work on older versions – please let me know in the comments if it does!

Hope it’s useful! Here’s some more of my Apple-related posts, or you could always just subscribe to the blog – here’s the RSS feed !

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Google & CalDAV

I think this is really quite important, though it sounds pretty technical and geeky at present. Google Calendars now support the CalDAV protocol. (So, incidentally, do Calgoo).

CalDAV is an open standard for synchronising and updating calendars, and I’ve been keeping an eye on it ever since Apple quietly announced, way, way back, that it would be supported in the Leopard version of iCal, their desktop calendar program. This meant that you could publish your calendar to a CalDAV server, and that other people could also subscribe to it and update it.

This is important because, for many people, calendar synchronisation (allowing things like meeting room booking as well) is the only reason they run the expensive abomination that is Microsoft Exchange. To have broader support for an open standard would be great! But my hopes of a brave new world were moderated somewhat when implementations of CalDAV servers, other than the one Apple shipped with its server OS, seemed to be few and far between.

Well, it’s still early days and there are limitations and some rough edges – like iCal not syncing such calendars to iPhone/iTouch – but it’s a good start: with people like Google and Calgoo now creating server implementations, and iCal, Calgoo and Mozilla Sunbird (at least) supporting CalDAV on the desktop, my hope is renewed…

Thanks to Garry for the link.

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iBlog

WordPress have, as is the mode du jour, released an iPhone/iTouch app which makes it easier to blog on the move. Or on the loo. If you can read this, it works. (The app, not the loo. No, don’t worry, I’m not really there!)

It’s a little flaky at the moment, but the concept is quite neat, except for the fact that you have to type on the little keyboard. Too bad it won’t rotate into landscape mode…

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Pasting the past

One of the most useful components of Quicksilver is the Clipboard History feature. If you have the Clipboard plugin enabled, you can bring it up with your normal Quicksilver keystroke followed by Cmd-L, and it will show all the recent entries in your clipboard. You can choose how many entries you’d like it to store.

There are various things you can do with this: double-clicking or hitting return on one of the items will insert that entry at the current point, for example. I’m filling in some US tax forms for several past years and being able to have things like our fullnames, tax references, and our full home address just a couple of keystrokes away makes the repitition a lot less painful!

For a different way of using the Clipboard History facilities, have a look at Nick Santilli’s handy screencast.

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Made mit ein Mac

Axel Springer, the German publishing group, has announced that it is switching all of its 10,000 employees to Macs over the next five years.

More rejoicing in the Apple marketing department, one imagines…

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Rock and Edirol

I must be just the sort of customer Apple love, I think. Having had fun playing with iMovie, I long ago upgraded to Final Cut Express, and I’m a big fan of Aperture, their offering for those who need more than iPhoto.

This week I decided to splash out on Logic Studio, which is a substantial upgrade from GarageBand, and I’m looking forward to getting to grips with it. A key part of the decision was that it includes Soundtrack Pro which is an exceedingly powerful audio editor/mixer and has good facilities for creating video soundtracks. The package isn’t cheap, but some of the individual components used to cost substantially more on their own in the not-too-distant past. And hey, who knows when I might have to mix a 5.1-surround soundtrack to my home movies! One thing was clear, though, I really needed to replace my miscellaneous cheap mic pre-amps, phantom power units etc with a better audio interface if I were to make the most of Logic.

The default manufacturer of such kit for amateurs like me is usually M-Audio – I have some other bits from them, and their Fasttrack Pro USB interface was recommended on Gear Media Tech.

But USB is almost always an inferior technology to Firewire, especially if you’re concerned about latencies or the number of channels. It’s something PC owners often have to live with, but Macs all have Firewire, so I thought about the M-Audio Firewire 410, which you can buy from the Apple Store or, at nearly half the price, from StudioSpares. However, as I read up on this, people seemed divided on whether M-Audio are good value for money, or just cheap, and in addition, they had taken a very long time coming up with Leopard drivers for the 410.

So in the end, I went for the Edirol FA-66, also available from Studiospares. (It doesn’t need any drivers for Mac OS X.)

On my first quick experiments, I’m very pleased. It does everything I wanted and more. All I need now is some talent to go with it!

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Happy talk?

I’ve always had very little luck with speech recognition systems. I don’t think my voice is that strange, but I’ve spent too much time on the phone trying to book flights and getting “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. Please say yes or no” repeatedly as I try everything to make the blasted machine understand one simple word. Ah well.

Still, people tell me that Dragon NaturallySpeaking on Windows is getting really quite usable now, but there hasn’t been an equivalent package for the Mac. Until now, apparently.

MacSpeech Dictate (formerly iListen) has been rewritten to use the Dragon recognition engine, which is generally said to be the best on the market.

It’s not too cheap at $200 (though the price does include a microphone), and there’s no try-before-you-buy option, but if you want or need this, it might well be worth it.

The reviews on Amazon seem to suggest that people love it or hate it – if it works, the recognition quality is exceedingly good – some say even better than the Windows product – but if you want complex features, unusual vocabularies, or customer support from the company, it sounds as if it might be worth waiting. More here.

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Delusions of grandeur

I think my iPod has ideas above its station.

I got a new car today. It’s rather nice. And it has an iPod adaptor cable.

When I plugged the iPod into this gleaming tonne-and-a-half of throbbing sports-tuned German engineering, it said, “Accessory attached“.

Accessory attached

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Using the Sony eBook Reader with a Mac

Sony eBook readerAbout a year ago I wrote about my experiments with getting a Sony PRS500 Reader talking to my Mac.

Quietly, over that time, it’s been getting easier, as Kovid Goyal has turned his rather unexcitingly-named libprs500 from a basic command-line utility to a full-featured GUI application, which can do things like capture RSS feeds and format them for the Sony. It still has some quirks, but is well-worth checking out, and it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

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