Using a P800 as a Bluetooth modem with OS X and a PowerBook

It’s taken a Powerbook to convince me of the worth of Bluetooth - synchronising with my P800 is way, way simpler than it used to using the Windows software. Pair up the phone with the Powerbook (which worked flawlessly, to my total amazement), hit iSync and away it goes.

Then I started getting adventurous, and wondered what would happen if I used the P800 as a GPRS modem. I never managed to get this working under Windows, and ran out of patience trying. But OS X has made the whole thing a lot easier if you know how - and Dave Miller does. Follow his instructions, and you’ll be surfing away in no time - although your GPRS bill will be mounting at the same time, which is why I haven’t been surfing with wild abandon just yet - but it may yet come in useful for those moments when I absolutely have-to-must get on the net..

Flooded out

We were woken up at 8 o’clock this morning by a thunderous banging on the front door, so cursing whoever it was who was so damn antisocial as to be banging on the front door at that hour, I got up. Which was a mistake. Rather than the warm, dry carpet that normally covers the bedroom floor, this was cold, wet carpet - squelchily-wet carpet in fact.

Turns out there was a leak in the apartment next door, and as our next-door neighbour is apparently away for a couple of weeks, it had been leaking unchecked for some considerable time. So now we’ve got cold, wet, squelching carpets throughout, anything that was on the floor overnight is soaked, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of it drying out any time soon. The efficiency and effectiveness of the contents insurance policy is about to be tested. The irony of all this is that living by the side of the river, we’re regularly asked what we’re going to do when it bursts its banks and floods us out (for the record, it would need to rise something like 25 feet and overwhelm the flood barriers before there was real cause for concern.) We now know exactly where the lowest point on the whole floor of the building is - it’s about two feet and slightly to the left of our front door…

Snoring PowerBook

I can’t decide whether this is the sign of obsessive attention to detail, or just a hardware designer out to lunch - but when you put a PowerBook into ’sleep’ mode, there’s a little white light on the screen latch that slowly pulses. Almost like it’s snoring.

Butt-kicking Microsoft with RSS

Scoble on Microsoft and RSS:

I really wish all of our teams here would publish in RSS. Syndication is another area where Apple is really kicking our behinds again.

Which I guess is a direct result of being the supertanker of the software world - you might have a hell of a lot of momentum, but it’s going to take you a hell of a long time to turn around. The smaller, more agile players out there are able to provide what people want now, while M$ is still obsessing about its roadmaps.

Filevault problems

A slightly hair-raising moment a couple of days ago - logging into the Powerbook, everything seemed suspiciously - default. No bouncing icons, no backdrop, no contacts and worse, no mail. Turns out I’m the victim of the vanishing Filevault syndrome - the logging-out process is supposed to go through some sort of a clean-up process before shutting down. and sometimes it’s a little too enthusiastic about cleaning up. With the net result that everything vanishes.

As it turned out (after a call to the Apple support people - oh the shame, seeking help from another real human being instead of Google) the data was still there once I’d gone back in and turned Filevault off again. It popped back up as a .sparseimage file, buried away somewhere non-obvious. Double-clicking the file brings up a prompt for the password, after which it mounts as a disk image. Then copying over the Library folder and playing around with the permissions means that it’s possible to retrieve application settings etc.

First entry

The first entry to force a page rebuild

An exceedingly cool online clock

An exceedingly cool online clock…

Printing from OS X to a LaserJet 1010 shared through a Windows PC

I thought setting up the PowerBook was going too well. Setting it up to print has been something of a nightmare process, with a resolution which was something of an anticlimax - by the time I stumbled across the solution I’d resigned myself to having to compile drivers or something similar at the very least, so that fact that it didn’t involve strings of Unix commands that resemble Czech was a both a relief and a bit of a let down.

Anyway, because there’s bugger-all on Google about this, here goes with the solution.

The scenario is a PowerBook running OS X Panther, talking via an Airport Extreme to a Windows XP box with a LaserJet 1010 attached via USB. The printer is set up using the bog-standard comes-on-a-CD drivers, and shared using the default WinXP sharing wizard.

Now go to the PowerBook, fire up the browser of your choice and surf over to LinuxPrinting.org. In the left hand menu bar there is a link for Mac OS X - click this to take you through to the Mac OS X printing page. Third link down is for the HPIJS. Download and install the Ghostscript package, then go back and do the same for the hpijs-foomatic package.

Now fire up the Printer Setup Utility, and add a new printer in the normal way. The dropdown list of drivers includes a heading for HP - select this, and scroll down to the ‘HP LaserJet 1010 Foomatic/hpijs recommended’ option, and add it. Load printer with paper, select document, and print away merrily.

Not too difficult a process - the hard part was spending the best part of two days Googling for the solution. A gentle suggestion to both Apple and HP - put the damn instructions on your damn websites, and better still, package it up so normal people aren’t sent running for the hills by the sight of the word ‘Linux’.

mcdonalds.mp3 (not)

In a move that is seemingly customer-designed to confirm my firmly-held belief that the people at Sony are out of their tiny little minds when it comes to the concept of the online music store, Techdirt are linking to a Yahoo story about the promotional plans for launching the store. Which is that they’re going to do a co-branded promotion with McDonalds.

Fantastic. Music you can’t play from the people that brought you food you can’t eat.

Switching continues - OS X software

One of the joys of switching is that it’s given me the perfect excuse to go out and start ratching through the internet for new software. When I bought the Powerbook, I decided that I was going to spend as little as possible on replacing software - partly for budgetary reasons, and partly because there seemed to be so much insanely cool free/shareware for OS X that paying commercial rates for bug-ridden bloatware was pointless. To be honest, I hadn’t expected that to be too successful, mainly because I’ve become used to packages like Dreamweaver and Photoshop and Office and the like. In fact, so far I’ve been proved wrong.

So here’s a few pointers for OS X resources for the newly-switched (i.e. me). Firstly a couple of meta-directories. Mac Update is a massive list of Mac software with an RSS feed of updates - and there’s at least two dozen a day. You can search by keyword and title and so on, and it lists freeware, shareware and commercial packages with links to downloads and vendor sites. OS X Apps is similar but not quite as funky - but it also lists scripts and java apps and so on.

Then specific software. This post comes courtesy of Ecto, which is the best offline blog client I’ve seen so far. They’re not exactly uncommon, but Ecto has a few extras which make all the difference - for example, the posting preview window pulls down the CSS from your Moveable Type blog so that it’s about as WYSIWYG as I’ve ever seen a posting preview window. You can configure it to force you to set a summary and category, which is something I’m forever forgetting to do, and there’s an excellent upload option, which allows you to drag and drop images, create thumbnails and convert images on the fly. Worth buying at £12.27.

I decided not to bother with AppleWorks or MS Office (at least initially) so I went for OpenOffice. It’s a bit intimidating at first - the main site is seemingly designed to frighten off all but the hardened Unix geeks, but once you browse behind the scary stuff it’s a straight-forward download and install. It runs under the X11 windowing system, so it’s not overly fast to start up, but once it’s up and running it’s fine. Unfortunately the interface hasn’t been updated for Aqua which means it looks a bit strange next to everything else, but it’s considerably faster and more stable than the MS Office equivalent. It’s a shame that it’s got such a consumer-unfriendly site, because once you’ve got it installed it gives MS Office real competition. I haven’t come across much functionality that it hasn’t got, leaving aside the bloatware bits that get tacked onto Office in the name of upgrades.

Chronosync is shaping up as a rather good backup utility - the demo version is a bit crippled, as it only allows 500 files to be synched at a time; it would have made more sense to me to have an unlimited but timebombed version as a demo. But it’s got what seems to be a pretty powerful set of rules-based options that you can apply, so it might be the answer to my backup paranoia.

CocoaMySQL is the best SQL client I’ve found so far - similar to SQLYog for PC, but in a nice Aqua-style interface (naturally And Transmit is a pretty functional FTP client, although I’m not entirely sure about software from a website with a URL like www.panic.com…

Still to find - a Dreamweaver equivalent, and comprehensible instructions for the GIMP (which holds the current title of Best Software Package Name as far as I’m concerned.) Other bits I could do with replacing are an Endnote-equivalent - BibDesk looks promising, especially the RSS bits. Other than that, a printer that works, a USB trackball and tablet to save my wrists from the ravages of RSI, and at this rate, an iPod.