kaotica

it’s been a while and if anyone ever actually reads this page then i apologise, i’ve been slightly busy

i’ll try to catch up some but as things stand can’t promise anything quite yet

I really liked my Treo, which is a palm pilot and a phone together, literally… the biggest gripe I had about the phone was that it’s a brick; the thing is big; which was fine at first because of all the functionality it offered; I would fully sync my address book with the one on my computer, which syncs with plaxo, so for the most part my addressbook was always up-to-date. It syncs my calendar so I know exactly when meetings were scheduled, I have a 1GB SD card in it, which is great for storing some MP3s and pictures and some games and other programs. I use MarkSpace’s Missing Sync for Palm, and it syncs iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, AddressBook and more with their Mac equivalents so as not to have to use PalmDesktop which I am not too big a fan of. It’s a great program if you have a Palm and a Mac, and it’s a Universal binary. I had the T-Mobile unlimited Internet plan which was an extra $20 a month, but I had web access, and MSN Messenger access through CC Lite; a small application that lets you use MSN Messenger on the Palm (both on Treos and on wi-fi enabled Palm Pilots)
The thing that I needed though was to have instant access to  email because of work, and
the Treo worked but wasn’t fast enough and as a Palm, did not support multitasking very well other than w/ the Phone application and Real Player.

A friend of mine saw me with my Treo the other day and asked me what provider I had and I said T-Mobile
and the first reaction was “Ooooh you can get the Pearl!” I thought about it and answered that I wasn’t a BlackBerry fan, which is what I told anyone that asked me why a Treo and not a BB. But I thought about it some more and the BlackBerry software had evolved considerably since it’s launch, and it served all my needs, and since I have been a loyal customer for more years than T-Mobile or VoiceStream even existed, I took advantage of my phone upgrade and got the Blackberry Pearl.

The first thing about the Pearl, as a smartphone, is it’s size; it’s small and it’s light!  It took a while to understand why the email features did not work, and in the end it was because the friendly sales rep at the store forgot to switch my Internet Plan to the BlackBerry Internet Plan, which costs the same, but has the email feature that has made BB’s so popular. Anyway, yesterday my MacBook Pro’s fan finally died, the one I wrote about in the Temperature post, I still had not taken the computer in to get fixed because I hadn’t had the time, so today I took it in to get the fans replaced. Again, kudos to Apple, I dropped the MBP off at the Apple Store on Miami Beach at 4pm and they told me it could take up to a week for the repair. At 7pm today I got a call saying that the computer was ready; both fans were replaced. How’s that for fast service??  I went to the store to get my computer and there was a guy there with a 12″ PowerBook and a Pearl in his hand and he and the Genius Bar guy were trying to get the phone to sync via bluetooth. I had read up on the Pearl’s inability to sync via Bluetooth last night so I told the guy. His PowerBook had USB 1.1 so the USB cable gave him problems, but he did not have it with him. I felt bad but without the cable we couldn’t test it to see if the issue was something else. I took my MBP and when I got home did a sync of my Treo and then followed these steps to get the Pearl to work on my machine:

1. I downloaded the Free PocketMac 4.0 binary from BlackBerry’s site. Download here.
2. I installed PocketMac and rebooted the computer. During the install it said it would quit all other applications and I let it close everything and install. After then install it prompted for a reboot, and did that as well
3. I turned the phone off, and launched PocketMac on the Mac which looks just like iSync, connected the USB cable to the Pearl, turned the phone on and connected it to the MBP.
4. PocketMac picked it up right away, so I configured what I wanted to Sync and it did the sync flawlessly. iCal, AddressBook all on the phone.

I played with it some more and initiated the Bluetooth pairing from the phone and the computer saw it and I paired the devices. I then sent an mp3 through BT to the phone and it worked, and I sent a picture from the phone to the computer, so I was able to get file transfers working as well!

Once the BB service was enabled on my account, I was able to add my email account (you can have up to 10 accounts) and it worked

I then played with the phone a little and it has an IM (Instant Messaging) icon so I opened it and it had MSN, ICQ, AIM and Yahoo and sure enough they are like BB versions of the programs, but look a lot better than CC Lite, and that’s when I discovered the best thing; the Pearl multitasks!I can leave MSN, AIM, and ICQ logged in , if i get a message it pops up even if I am doing something else, like checking email or something. The keyboard is odd compared to the Treo, but it’s not very complicated and the Predictive text is pretty good. I also played with the Voice Dialing feature, which scans your phonebook when u say “Call John” for John, and dials John’s number, and the nice thing is you don’t have to train it! I just fed it numbers when I tested it because it was before I synced my contacts to it but it worked perfectly. Anyway, I will miss solitaire, but I will just download and install it on the Pearl when I get a chance. Anyone interested in a Treo?
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There are a gabillion FTP programs for OS X and each has it’s own funky features. On Windows I was a big fan of BulletProof FTP (BPFTP) which was originally (8 years ago) very well designed and easy to use allowing folder traversal with ease, however with time the versions got bulkier and less efficient in my opinion. On the Mac they (Bullet Proof Software) released an OS X version but it was a distant cousin of the Windows version, without a lot of the functionality, and the interface was clunky and overall during beta testing was far from a polished product. I went on the lookout for an alternate and tried Fetch, which was the old-school standard in the MacOS 8 days, but I still wanted more of the BPFTP feel, so I downloaded Transmit. Transmit ran fine on the G5 and they released a Universal version as well. The interface took a little time to get used to but it’s very straight forward and I purchased it after the demo period expired. The newer versions have more and more features, such as queues and multiple transfers, syncing folders, etc. I am happy with it and recommend it if you work with a lot of FTP servers; especially with the ease of organizing all my clients’ FTP servers etc.

Now some of you may need to do occastional FTPs w/o need for actually purchasing an FTP program… here you have two built in options; 1) use Terminal and use the unix command ftp which  you can find tons of information about online, or 2) use the OS X’s ability to mount remote network drives. To do this, in the Finder, go to the Go menu and select Connect to Server and a window will pop up. in the Server Address box type the name of your server as an FTP url, ftp://ftp.kaotica.com you then have the option of hitting the + sign next to it to add it to your “favorite servers”. Once you are ready click the Connect button and a window will pop up asking for your username and password. Input your FTP username and password, and you can also save the information to your keychain for future use. Once connected your FTP server will now appear as an icon in all Finder windows and you can now upload or download files as if the FTP server were a regular drive connected to your machine!

Those of you running an Intel Mac know that a laptop ceases to be a lap-top, and more of a portable frying platform. Omelette anyone? They get hot, real hot, too hot! I use my MacBook Pro on an iCurve platform that raises it off the desk to aide in cooling however it’s still hot. 76C as I write. How do I know this? That’s the whole point of this post

Most all new motherboards/logic boards in modern computers are full of sensors to check all sorts of vital statistics which keep the computer up and running. At the hardware level, computers are getting very very fast, and the tradeoff is HEAT, and HEAT and electronics overall don’t have a very good relationship. In my case, my MacBook Pro (mbp) died 2 weeks ago because it got an excessive dose of humidity due to the stable weather here during the summer months. The motherboard and another card were replaced in the computer and AppleCare returned the computer in 2 days instead of the 2 weeks, I was and still am happy about the level of service. Three days ago however the mbp started making odd noises, and it felt real hot. I searched and searched and found 2 great utilities for the Intel Macs which I want to share with you guys.

CoreDuoTemp Download here.
This little program adds 3 numbers to the top of your screen on the Finder Bar, the Temperature of the CPU, CPU usage percentage, and the CPU Frequency, you can remove some of the ones you are not interested. You can leave it running and at least now you’ll know how hut the computer is before you consider scalding your laps
smcFanControl Download here.
This program gives you control. It opens up and like CoreDuoTemp shows you the current temperature of the CPU, but also shows you the speed of the little fans that are in your computer which help cool down the computer. If your CPU temps are too high, you can take control of the fans’ speed and crank it up so that they cool down the CPU and other components better. You can seriously cool the CPU temps if you don’t mind a little extra noise from the fans.
Thanks to smcFanControl, I quickly noticed that when they reassembled my mbp, one of the fan connectors was not properly reconnected because Fan #1 is spinnning at 3207 RPM while Fan #2 is at 0 RPM. Now, once I get the problem fixed, I might finally be able to crank the fans up and actually use it as a laptop

Quicktime Player has evolved significantly since it’s inception in the early 90’s. It used to be a player specifically designed for the Mac and if you didn’t have a Mac, well, tough luck. Then came Quicktime Player for Windows, if I recall, the first ever program released for Windows by Apple. It was horrible and it was a memory hog; slowing Windows boxes to a crawl (ok I’m exaggerating a little, but it was quite bad). Now eons later, MS has “invented” Media Player and it’s evolutions have now already brought it to version 10! Impressive, in some respect I think that every release of Windows Media Player included some new feature “borrowed” from a competing product, be it RealPlayer, WinAmp, or whatever other media players were out on the market… anyway, Quicktime obviously is still developed by Apple, so many of these new players created new file formats that were not compatible with Quicktime (QT). Long story short, there are now several codecs you can install into QT to be able to view just about every format movie or sound clip.

Two I recommend are Universal plugins that you can easily install;
Perian Download Here

Perian is actually a whole bunch of codecs bundled together. The great thing about it is that it saved you tons of time by not having to go from site to site to find all the different codecs you may want like DivX or AVI w/ mpeg4 and what not. It’s still a beta, but I definitely commend and recommend it! Installation could not be easier, and for once the installer uses a great feature that OS X provides from it’s unix base, symbolic links; since the structure of the underlying operating system is standard, the directories are too, so when programming, it’s easy, unlike in windows, to know where files are, without touching or editing that pandora’s box called a Registry. Long story short, Perian’s installer window makes use of that feature.
Flip4mac Download Here
Flip4mac took their sweet time to port the Windows Media Audio codec to Mac, seeing Microsoft couldn’t both with it and decided to outsource it. Microsoft stopped developing Windows Media Player for Mac a while ago, and it’s a good thing; if their programs are excessively buggy on Windows, a platform, they themselves developed, imagine on a platform they didn’t develop! Flip4mac will allow you to play files that were encoded for Windows Media Player on your Mac. Not all formats are supported, but a good chunk of them are, so you should be covered except for the newer stuff they’ve released.

All in all, installing those two packages, you should be well off in viewing most files you will run into while browsing online.

One Key feature of Quicktime Player Pro that I want to mention because I have yet to see any other player that will do this, is the ability to rotate a video clip. If you don’t understand what I mean, imagine you have a nifty little Canon digital camera, which also allows you to film short movies. Now, seeing you are used to taking pictures with it, you switch the camera to take landscape (normal) and portrait (rotated 90 degrees) pictures. The problem is that sometimes when you are in camera mode, you start filming in portrait mode, and when you download the video clip to your computer, you have to become a Yoga master to  view the video clip because it’s sideways. If there is enough demand (just post a comment below) I will post instructions on how to rotate a video clip using QT Pro.

For all of you that use a variety of chat programs, these are three new releases that are worth a mention as they are all relatively new versions of old programs that were either pretty bad on the Mac or had sketchy Intel support;

aMSN Download here.
Is a third party MSN Messenger application that unlike Microsoft’s Mac MSN client, is actually in the era of 2006, and not stuck with functionality that was surpassed 10 years ago. Some of the better features (to me) are ability to video conferece, ability to have a single tabbed chat window, see peoples’ dispaly pictures in the main window, ability to save and view animated custom emoticons, as well as going through the display picture cache and setting your picture to be that of anyone in your list. The connection is more stable as well in that it does not knock you offline as often as the MS client does. It has some stability issues, but nothing any worse than the MS client.

Skype 2.0 for Mac Download here.
Sykpe is the program that made VOIP a household term… at least somewhat Skype for the Mac has worked fine, but again, it’s windows brother always had the newer features before the Mac version did. Finally Skype 2 beta offers 3 important new things; 1) it’s universal so it runs quicker and more efficiently on the Intel Macs, next, 2) the user interface is much cleaner and more minimalistic than the previous version, and lastly 3) the new version supports video as well, so you can see and talk to the person at the same time. Overall, a great improvement over it’s prior version!
Y! Messenger 3.0 beta Download here.
Yahoo has never been very high on my list ever since it opened up shop in the early mid-90’s however their latest messenger application for the Mac deserves a mention. It supports video and adding people that are on MSN to your buddy list, so it works great as a cross-service messenger application; albeit only for those two services. It also supports animated emoticons and file transfers. The downside is you can’t use it to log into your MSN account.
Proteus Download here.
I am going to mention Proteus simply because it’s the Mac equivalent of Trillian; allowing you to use a single application to communicate to people on all the chat networks. The problem is that you can only communicate on a per-network basis, and that some of the more advanced features that messaging clients have nowadays are not available. Despite it’s pitfalls, the great thing about Proteus is that it allows you to group messenger accounts into 1, so if you have a friend that insists on having 3 accounts on MSN, 2 on Yahoo, 2 on AIM, you can consolidate them all into one “person” so if any of the accounts are online, that person shows as online. You can then pick what account to message the person on etc. It’s definitely worth it if you don’t want to install 3 or 4 different client applications, and don’t have the screen space to have them all open at the same time. Development as of late seems a little unstable, but you can have a look nonetheless.

iStumbler is a great little application  I discovered a while ago when I was looking for some tools for my MacBook Pro when working on several wireless networks that were in range of each other, which sometimes would confuse the Airport detection program in OS X. This great program allows you to see all wireless networks detected by Airport, including the ones that don’t broadcast SSID info and ad-hoc networks.  It also will tell you what bluetooth devices are in range and much more info than you know what to do with. I use it as my tool of choice when travelling to find freebie w-lan sites so I can connect Download at www.istumbler.net

After a couple months offline, the kaotica blog is back. Why oh why was it offline for so long you may ask yourself… well, the main reason is I have not had time to doodle with the new host that kaotica.com is on to fix it properly. The blog was actually here all along, you just could not see it because when i imported all the data it garbled up all the formatting etc. So, now, simply because of this pressing urgency to post things, I decided to wipe everything and start over, and when I have the time and patience to extract the old posts, I can update the database entries with the older ones so that the historical value of the posts retain their integrity and meaning in life. Whatever. I am tired and had a long day; either way, I just wanted to let the few people that actually read this that the blog is back and I will eventually get back to posting all the useful nothings that I used to!