Almost Paradise

The observant reader may notice that the text in this blog now looks rather more crowded than it did before. This is not an accident — but it is a kludge. (A detailed explanation follows after the jump. It’s geeky and tedious. You have been warned.)

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For the last 10+ years, I have used a standalone Windows-based PIM called Time & Chaos on my work PC to track my work and personal contact and calendar data. About 5 years ago, I picked up a Palm and got it synced with my PIM. All was well with the world. Then, a year or two ago I got a Mac. And I got a Razr V3. I learned the joys of Bluetooth address book syncing between the Razr and iCal. Life was pretty good. And then my office started using Outlook, and I realized that I really needed to have my contact and calendar data there too (the work-related stuff, at least).

So now if I have a work-related entry, I enter it twice — once into my old PIM, and once into Outlook. (If it’s a personal entry, I don’t want to put it into Outlook because our Outlook data can be shared and I don’t know enough yet about Outlook to assure myself that my personal stuff won’t get shown all over the office network.) If I get new contact data for someone, I may be punching it in three times: once into my cell phone, once into my Palm or my old PIM, and once into Outlook.

I would love to make better use of Google Calendars and my Mac’s Address Book and iCal, too, but it feels like I’m in too deep already. I am drowning in contact and calendar apps.

Hasn’t somebody come up with a way to get all this stuff to work together yet? I would love to simplify things so that I have my contact and calendar data on: (1) Outlook on my work Windows PC, (2) iCal/Address Book on my home Mac, and (3) whatever my mobile device uses, so that work and home and mobile all get synced.

Speaking of mobile devices… my Razr has served me well but the 2-year contract is almost up. And my Palm is nice and solid, but Palm the company seems like a sinking ship these days. I have been thinking hard about jumping to a phone with PDA features as well. The Treo used to hold my attention, but now the iPhone’s siren song calls! My only reservations are (1) the cost, (2) the cost, (3) the cost, and (4) the certainty that I will need to look stuff up while I am on the phone, and how the hell do you do that anyway if you’ve only got one device?

Maybe Google Calendars is the glue that I need to hold all this stuff together. Web 2.0, take me away from all this!

Vista has expanded the Times New Roman character set so that it can support Hawaiian typography. It’s now finally possible to correctly type a Hawaiian word like “Kāneʻohe” in the default font of the default word processor. No more excuses!

Rassa frassa @#$^%!&…

Tommy asked me to set up the Wifi connection on his new Nintendo DS Lite so that he could play Animal Crossing over the net using our home Wifi network.

No problem — a year or two ago I’d helped set Chris up so he could play Mario Kart over IP on his DS. So I opened the DS Lite setup screen and tapped in our WEP key — and got an error message. Huh. I tried it again, with the same result. After several careful tries, I ruled out data entry errors and knew I had to do some research. Why wasn’t it working now, when it worked fine a year ago? When I found out, the answer was truly annoying.

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I recently had a blinding flash of insight: even though external USB 2.5″ hard disk drives can get their power from a USB port without needing a separate adapter, all USB ports are not equal. Some have enough power, and others don’t.

When I bought an external enclosure for an old 2.5″ notebook HDD a while ago, I puzzled over the odd USB cable that came with it. The cable had a mini-B plug on the end that plugged into the enclosure… but on the other end, it forked into two standard-A plugs. Huh? I didn’t get it. Was it supposed to be so you could use two USB devices off of one port? But if that was the purpose, then on one end it should have had a standard-A to go into the PC, and on the other end it should have forked into two plugs, the mini-B and maybe a standard-A. Now I get it — this cable is actually supposed to take up two USB ports on your computer, in order to draw enough juice to spin the HDD.

I had been mystified by the iffy startup behavior of this HDD for a few weeks — sometimes it’d start up OK and sometimes it’d repeatedly spasm, trying to spin up — but the power thing makes it all clear now. The (probably too long) USB cable I’ve been trying to use with the HDD isn’t giving it enough juice. As it happens, my computer has another USB cable that I’ve been using for years to hotsync my Palm. Since the Palm has its own power cable connected to a dedicated power adapter, it uses USB only for data, not for power. So I tried switching devices, so that the HDD uses the formerly-for-the-Palm cable, and the Palm uses the not-enough-juice-for-the-HDD cable. Now both gadgets are happy. Problem solved.

Y’know, you’d think I would have figured this out a long time ago. D’oh!

I try to spell Hawaiian words correctly whenever I can, which among other things means using kahakō and ʻokina correctly. I’m not fluent in Hawaiian, so I rely on dictionaries for my spelling. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library, offers an excellent set of online dictionaries. Four major Hawaiian-language references are rolled into one search engine.

What I really like is that if I set the Ulukau search engine to “All Dictionaries”, “other characters”, and “find regular spelling”, I can enter an American-style no-accent-marks version of a Hawaiian word and get the correctly accented spelling; e.g. if I type in “Kaneohe”, I get “Kāneʻohe”. And if I type in “pau”, I get all four possible words: “pau”, “paʻu”, “paʻū”, and “pāʻū”.

I also like Firefox. Great browser, lots of very useful add-ons. I found a Taiwanese Firefox add-on called OpenSearchFox that lets me add the Ulukau search engine (or any web site’s search engine, for that matter) to the Firefox Search bar. So now my Hawaiian language dictionary is at my fingertips. Very, very cool. Is this what they mean when they talk about Web 2.0?

In the last five months I’ve found an armload of great OS X freeware:

Firefox is my default web browser, but I also use Camino and SeaMonkey.

For an office application suite, you can’t beat OpenOffice. Its OS X incarnation is NeoOffice.

OS X has a good set of system utilities, but there are still a few gaps here and there. For example, it’s not easy to know file and folder sizes at a glance — using ⌘-I in the Finder will only gives you one size measurement at a time. WhatSize measures your whole hard disk and lets you know, well, what size everything on it is. It’s a must when housecleaning time inevitably comes around.

Azureus is my BitTorrent client of choice for P2P downloading. And once you’ve downloaded all those files, for unpacking zipped and archived items, StuffIt Expander and UnRarX come in handy.

Now that I have a fast computer that can read DVDs and play videos, I’ve been experimenting with ripping my DVDs to AVI files using HandBrake, and playing them (and files in practically any other video format, too) with VLC.

If I need a Photoshop-style image editor, I use The GIMP or Seashore. But honestly, iPhoto is often all I need for cropping and resizing. I’m not crazy about iPhoto’s goofy file structure, and I don’t trust it to manage my images, but it sure has nifty tools.

I use ArcGIS at work, so of course I was curious as to what kinds of geographic information systems apps are out there for the home user. ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education doesn’t have the professional-grade capabilities of its full-service big cousin, but it reads shapefiles just fine, and that’s 95% of what most people want. And hey, it’s free, which is a hell of a lot cheaper than paying per-seat licensing for ArcGIS. And although Google Earth isn’t strictly a GIS app, I include it here because it’s still an amazing tool for looking at the world and I use it just as often.

Other than the Apple apps that come pre-installed in Tiger, the only OS X software app that I’ve actually paid money for is CrossOver Mac, a Windows emulator to let me run those few Windows apps for which there isn’t a good OS X counterpart, like specialized technical software, or certain games, or even Internet Explorer (!). Rival Windows virtualization apps like Parallels Desktop require you to buy (!) and install (!!) Windows onto your Mac, but Crossover Mac works without needing an actual copy of Windows. Instead, it emulates the Windows APIs and fools the Windows apps into thinking that they are running in a Windows environment. It’s very cool, it doesn’t make you vulnerable to Windows viruses, and at $60 it’s also a lot cheaper than having to buy a full copy of Windows.

I use CrossOver Mac to run a few hard-to-replace Windows apps: AutoStitch (an awesome image-stitching tool), ACDSee 2.42 (my favorite old image browser), Picasa (potentially my favorite new image browser, if Google ever develops an OS X version), and even some technical software from work like Visual Sample Plan. I love it.

Last summer, after 20 years of owning and upgrading and playing with PCs — and, all too often, cursing as I nursemaided them through one glitch after another — I finally got tired of dealing with all the spyware and the adware and the viruses. I started taking long slow walks through the Apple Store, eyeing the sleek notebooks… and finally in August I took the plunge and bought a MacBook Pro. We named it Oscar.

At first, Oscar was meant to be Judy’s, since her old Vaio had recently given up the ghost. But a week later, she declared that she really needed a Windows PC. “I need my MSN Games,” she said. “They’re my stress relief at the end of the day. And that means I need Internet Explorer.” Well OK, honey. If that’s what you really want. So we headed to Best Buy and picked up a shiny new Vaio instead, which Judy promptly dubbed Phoebe. She then turned Oscar over to me.

Now it’s five months later, and I’m a total OS X convert. I was sold the first time I browsed my Razr V3’s photo files over Bluetooth. So smooth, so easy. The Apple ads are right; Macs really do just work. And my Oscar is a gorgeous piece of engineering. He’s built better than any PC notebook I’ve had my hands on.

I’m still running a Windows PC at work, and at home I’m still maintaining Windows PCs for my family members. But as for myself, well, I don’t miss Windows at all. Once you go Mac, you don’t go back.

Ack! I spoke too soon. The IAU’s twelve-planet idea was a proposal, not a final decision. Today the astronomers of the world actually voted on the proposal, and decided to add one more criterion to the definition of planet: you can’t be a planet unless you’ve swept your orbital path clean. That rules out Ceres… and Xena… and Pluto and Charon. So much for an expanded planetary family!

It’s been in the newspapers this week: the International Astronomical Union has decided that it’s time to welcome a few new members into the solar system’s roster of nine planets. And while they were at it, the astronomers’ union decided to clarify the definition of exactly what counts as a planet.

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