Rick's World

Yesterday was Christmas. I ended up going to spend the day with my family at their house. It was a great day.

I got there about 9:45AM, and by about 10:30AM we were opening gifts. There were a lot of gifts to open. Every Christmas, there is the eternal battle between the parents and the kids over who opens their gifts first. My parents always insist that the kids (ages 37 and 40) open their gifts first. The 'kids' always insist that the parents open the gifts first. The kids have been winning that battle lately. :)

Mom and dad alternated opening their gifts. There were a few 'misfires' along the way. My dad bought my mom a nice digital camera, but we mistakenly gave her the memory card to open first, so she kind of knew what the next gift was. To make matters worse, I later discovered that the salesman had sold my father the wrong type of memory for the camera. My mom has to go exchange the memory for the right type today. My parents also got various other gifts like music CDs, clothes etc. The last gift I gave them was a big color, networked laser printer. The number of computers in their house is starting to grow. The bro owns two computers and mom & dad share a third. I thought it would be good to get them a networked printer that everyone could use. I later helped them put the printer together and get everything networked properly. Now two of the three computers work perfectly with the printer. The only one I wasn't able to get working (yet) with the printer is the bro's new Mac Mini. I can't seem to get that thing configured properly. I'm going to have to research how to fix that.

Once the parents finished opening their gifts, it was the 'kids' turn. My brother and I alternated opening gifts. He got an iPod Shuffle (2nd generation) from me, some seat covers for his car, a Harmony 676 remote. (I also got one), and a set of noise-canceling headphones from me.

For Christmas, I received a Harmony 676 remote. This is the same one my brother also received. I also received a set of the new Apple earphones from my brother, a DLO HomeDock Deluxe, also from my brother (which was a BIG surprise!), and a copy of 'Bone: One Volume Edition'. What is Bone? It's a 1,300 page comic book! Essentially it's the complete series of an independent comic book that ran for over 100 issues. It's a very well known and award winning series. I had heard about it for years, but never read it so I thought it would be interesting to read. I'll blog my thoughts on my Christmas gifts more, once I've had a chance to play with them (and read them!)...

Once the gifts were all opened and the mess cleaned up, we all went off to play with our new toys. Mom went off to look at her new digital camera, the bro went off to try out his new remote, Dad went off to start cleaning up the desk for the printer, and I settled down to do a little light reading on my 1,300 page comic book. After not too long, I was playing 'Mr. Tech Support' to both my brother and my father at the same time. I was going back and forth between my brother, helping him setup the remote and my father, helping him setup the new printer. We got the printer connected properly and the remote working. That remote is a very confusing thing! I got it to mostly work for the brother, but there are still some flaky things I have to figure out about it. It was good to spend some time helping the brother with the remote since I also got one and I'm going to need to figure that thing out for myself too.

Later, we ate our Christmas dinner (at 3pm!). It was a nice dinner consisting of a Honeybaked Ham, homemade mashed potatoes, vegetables, and biscuits. It was a VERY tasty dinner. Everything was very good.

After that my brother left for a while to visit some friends for Christmas. I stayed and chatted with my parents, watched TV and all around enjoyed spending time with my family. We all had some ice cream for 'desert', and then later in the evening we had a small second helping of food for 'dinner'. I left the house that evening and came home.

I managed to connect the HomeDock pretty easily to my home stereo and get it working. It seems to work well. It has an onscreen display for the music side of the iPod. For the videos on the iPod, it really doesn't have much in the way of onscreen display. It just shows the movie and that's it. However, I must say that the videos off of the iTunes store look quite good on my bigscreen TV. Are they as good as DVDs? No, but they are quite acceptable. These are the newer 640x480 resolution videos. I'm not sure how well a lower resolution video will look. I'll have to try those and see. I still have to rearrange some things in the stereo for that HomeDock, but it seems to be working. My 'poor man's iTV' is up and running! I think this could end up even working out better than the iTV in many ways.

As for the Harmony Remote, that thing was a major pain to setup. I'll go into more details later, but suffice it to say, it took me several hours of installing drivers, updating firmware, installing software, updating software, trying different things, I got it to *mostly* work. I still have some problems with it that I need to straighten out, but it looks like it has potential.

All in all, it was a great Christmas. I had a good time with my family and I hope they did too.

For the last two years or so, I've been exploring the world of Apple products quite heavily. I've owned three different iPods, and two different Macintoshes in this time frame. It's rare that one company's products can change your life and your outlook in such a short range of time.

Before I discovered the iPod, I had tried a number of other MP3 players and was very underwhelmed. The flash based players were flimsy and very fragile. The UI sucked. The hard drive based players were big, bulky, heavy and very clunky. The entire hard drive based player would jerk whenever the hard drive heads were seeking data.

After I bought my first iPod, I fell in love with MP3 players. My first iPod was a fourth generation, 40GB iPod. It only had a monochrome screen, but it played the music beautifully, was brain-dead simple to navigate (love that click wheel!) and ended up changing the way I listen to music. I used to buy CDs and keep them in a CD case in my car. Whenever the stuff on the radio sucked (as it OFTEN does), I'd pop a CD in and listen to that. At one point I even had a 10 CD changer installed in the trunk for just such a purpose. Now, after buying an iPod, I never listen to CDs. I have a 6 CD changer integrated into my car stereo, but it never gets used. Instead, I have an iPod interface installed in my car stereo. With a 40GB HD on the iPod, instead of 6 CDs worth of music available whenever I want, I know essentially have thousands of CDs available at any time. Essentially I can have ALL the music I'd ever want to listen to in my car at all times. The CDs are now basically a 'backup' of the iPod. I only buy them to dump the songs onto the iPod and then they go on the shelf never to be used again. Add to this, the large number of podcasts out there, and I have an endless supply of stuff to listen to in the car. I rarely listen to the radio anymore. That first iPod was the beginning of the 'iPod Halo Effect' for me.

Before I discovered the Macintosh, I lived in the land of Windows. Windows has always been very buggy and very flakey for one reason or another over the entire time I'd used it. Whether it was security bugs, or stability problems, Windows was always a hassle to deal with. Aggravation was my normal impression of Windows machines.

After I bought my first Macintosh (a PowerPC based Mac Mini), I fell in love with the Mac. In less than 3 months, I'd gone from never having used a Mac in 15 years, to buying a small Mac, to spending $1800 on a full blown, dual core PowerMac G5. That's what I'm writing this blog on now. I plan to upgrade to the new Mac Pro at some point. I'd been a fan of Linux for some time before this, but Linux had always annoyed me due to the fact that it was very difficult to set up. The Mac, is based on FreeBSD, which is a variation on Unix. Linux is also a variation on Unix. I love the design of Unix, so the Mac ended up being the best of both worlds for me. It had the graphical, easy to use nature of Windows, but with the stability and all around better design of Unix. I am so enamored with the Mac these days, I'd seriously consider abandoning the last 12 years of Windows programming experience I have, in favor of a job programming Macs. A life free of Microsoft and Windows would be heaven indeed.

Why do I call it the Apple 'Curse'? Because, ever since seeing how well Apple designs things, I just cannot accept badly designed products anymore. When you see how well Apple does things, you just cannot tolerate anything below those standards anymore. For every MP3 player that comes out, such as the Zune, my first thought is always "Is it as good as the iPod?" Inevitably, the answer is always "no". Am I blinded by my like for the iPod? No. If there is a product out there that is genuinely better, I'll drop the iPod in favor of it. Competition is a good thing. I always try to give every iPod competitor a fair chance to win my heart away from the iPod. I just haven't seen anything that can do that yet. Are there other devices that have more features than the iPod? Yes. (such as the Zune). But features aren't everything. It's the 'whole package' that matters to me. Sure the iPod lacks a build in FM tuner. So what? I can get an FM tuner add-on for it, if I want it. The lack of an FM tuner doesn't out way the MUCH easier to use, much more compact and much lighter iPod. I won't give up the iPod for a case of 'featuritis'. The Zune has a great UI and some nice features... It's *close* to beating the iPod, but it's just not there yet. It's too bulky, it's PC software sucks, and it's online store implementation is atrocious and downright offensive. Maybe in a couple of years, when Microsoft gets is right, the Zune will be an option. Until then, the iPod still wins for me.

This whole increase in what I expect out of a product is also why I ultimately rejected the Sony Reader, which I wrote about in my previous blog. It was close, but not quite there. Prior to my experience with Apple products, I may have bought it anyway and just put up with the few things I didn't like about it. Not anymore.

I read a lot of books. Whether they be computer related books, novels, comic books or whatever, I read them. My entire house is filled with books. Everywhere you look in my house there are books and/or magazines. For a few years now, I've been walking around with a Palm Tungsten E PDA. In my PDA, I have a 1GB Secure Digital card filled with various books. Whenever I have a few minutes to kill, I pull it out and start reading. It's a great way to carry books around without taking up much space. However, I've been finding it inconvenient to use lately. Most books these days are in PDF format, and the relatively low resolution of the Palm PDA doesn't make reading PDF files very practical.

I discovered the Sony Reader some time ago. It's a very nice little electronic book reader. It has an 800x600 pixel resolution, monochrome screen. It works with PDF files, RTF files, text files and even MP3 files. It also uses a fascinating new technology called eInk. This basically is a way of displaying text on a screen using essentially NO power! Once the picture is drawn on the screen, it uses no power to maintain the image on the screen. The only power used is to initially redraw the screen. This means that the Sony Reader can literally last thousands of pages without a recharge. Most of the time you are just reading the page, so it uses no power during this time. It comes with some internal memory, allowing you to store a number of books in it's memory. You can also put a Secure Digital memory card into it to store even more books on it. I have a Secure Digital card full of books already. This sounds like the perfect upgrade to my homemade PDA book reader. Unfortunately, it has some deficiencies that I think make it 'not quite there' for me.

First of all, this thing is expensive! It costs $350. That's one expensive book! My Palm PDA only costs about $200 and it does a lot more than just read books. If this thing were about $200, I'd be more inclined to buy it.

Next, it's slow! Page turns on this thing are very sluggish. It can take a couple seconds for a new page to be displayed. That's unacceptable.

Next, is the way is switches pages. It's rather annoying. Whenever you flip pages, the entire screen flashes black for a second, then the text appears. This black flash on every page turn is very disorienting. I would think that the entire screen would go blank between page turns, rather than going entirely black! It would feel more natural that way and I would guess more power efficient too. It must take power to draw the entire screen black before redrawing it with just the text.

Next, is the UI. If you are just reading a book, the UI is obvious enough. It's just the book page. There is a 'next page' button and a 'previous page' button to flip pages. That's about where the UI falls apart. Besides the two page flip buttons, there is a small 'joystick' in the lower right hand corner used for flipping through the menus. You move the joystick up, down, left and right to choose menu items and press the center of the joystick to select things. It's an odd arrangement. If you don't press that joystick just right, you end up pushing it in one of the 4 directions, instead of down. This causes your menu selection to change to the wrong item! There is also an odd little button built into the lower right hand corner of this joystick that is used for some selections. It's all very non-intuitive.

Next, is the screen itself. While I don't mind that it's monochrome (how often do you really need color while reading a book?), it isn't quite right. The resolution is nice and for the most part the text displays quite clearly. The problem is that if text is fairly small, it tends to fade from black to almost a dull gray. This dull grey on the very light grey background is kind of hard to read. You would almost need to read the entire book in a bold font in order to get around this problem.

It's a shame. I really wanted to like this device. It was so close to what I wanted in an ebook reader. If a few small things could get fixed on this device, I could see myself buying one. Unfortunately, it's not quite there yet. Maybe Version 2.0 of this thing will solve these problems, assuming they even make a newer version. Sony just doesn't seem to be doing a very good job with their products lately.

Thanks to my friend Dave, for pointing me to this new trailer for the upcoming Transformers movie.

I'm going to have to do another big review (with pictures!) of this trailer later tonight...

I am a serious Sudoku addict. I have it on my cell phone, on my Palm Pilot, on my Mac, and now it looks like I'm going to have it on my iPod!

It took a while, but Apple has finally broken through my defenses and found something I want to buy on the iTunes Store! :)

I just stumbled across another Mac shareware promotion site - MacSanta.com. They are offering a 20% discount on a bunch of different shareware applications. I looked over the list and didn't see anything interesting to me, but someone else might find it useful. It seems like a very last minute thing though... Christmas is less than a week away!

If you want to go to Google Mail, but want the entire connection to be secure, just go to https://mail.google.com. The entire time you are on Google Mail, including your login and reading ALL your email will be secure.

The next app on my list is Unison. Unison is an excellent newsgroup reader. Newsgroups are a great source of information on just about any topic you can imagine. Many of them also contain binaries, i.e. images, sounds, etc. Unison not only does an excellent job at reading the messages, it also has built in support for many types of binary files. You can browse an entire newsgroup of images within the program and see all the images themselves automatically. There's no need to know how to download them, decode them etc. They just appear. It works beautifully. It is also multithreaded so it can download multiple binaries at the same time.

It costs $24.95 at Panic Software. I bought it and I hate to spend money! :) If you read newsgroups a lot, try it!

The next great little Mac application that I found is Delicious Library. Oh my God, I love this little program!

Delicious Library is a program designed to keep track of your collection of books, CDs, video games etc. It presents a virtual 'bookshelf' on the screen that shows each of your books/CDs etc on the shelf. You can then click on an item, enter notes about it, and even check it out/in to various people. It's a quite nice library program.

I picked up this program as part of the $49 MacHeist bundle. This bundle is a collection of 10 different commercial Mac apps, that normally cost $289, all combined together for $49. Delicious Library alone normally costs $40 by itself, so this bundle was a good deal. A lot of the Mac apps that I'm going to be writing about were purchased through this bundle. You'll be seeing me writing more about other apps in this bundle in upcoming entries.

What has to be the coolest feature I've ever seen is the barcode scanner. It actually turns your iSight video camera into a barcode scanner! All you have to do is hold each book/CD etc. up to the iSight camera and it will automatically scan the barcode, look up the information and add a new item, already completely filled in! It even includes a picture of the book. This feature allows you to not only see the names of all your items, but the covers too! The barcode scanner is so easy to use, I literally scanned 25 different books into the application in about 5 minutes! Unfortunately, the demo of the program has a limit of 25 items. I hit that limit way too quickly with this barcode scanner. I do own a legal copy of this app, but unfortunately they haven't sent me the registration for it yet, so I'm kind of stuck on it for now. Once they send me the registration, I'll finish adding all my various items into the library. I expect it won't take long.

This is the first in a series of cool little applications that I've found for my Mac. Hopefully you'll find these apps as useful as I do...

The first app is YummyFTP. This is an incredible FTP client. It uploads and downloads files very fast. It is also multithreaded, so it will upload/download multiple files at the same time. It costs $25 at their web site, and I think it is well worth the money. I had originally been looking at Panic Software's Transmit which costs $29.95, but I've since found that YummyFTP works much better (and it's cheaper too).

I didn't have to pay $25 for this app though. I got lucky and 'bought' it for free through MacAppADay's promotion this month. So far this app has been the only really good app they've offered. The rest were toys. This one was well worth the money though.