Walt-O-Matic

I’ve started doing quite a bit more with Photography and Photo Editing these days and decided it made sense to purchase a device to color correct my screen, providing me true Pantone calibration for color control.

I purchased Pantone’s Huey, a USB device with a color sensor that looks at your monitor and makes the necessary adjustments to the color space and gamma in order to render true colors. In theory, any two screens that have been calibrated will have images that look the same, and any content that is professionally printed will look exactly like it did on screen.

NOTE: IF YOU HAVE A DUAL-MONITOR SYSTEM, THE HUEY IS NOT FOR YOU. I GOT BURNED BY THIS.

In virtually every way, the Huey is an exceptional device. It supports OS X with a Universal Binary, it supports XP, it’s installation and use is trivial, it can even monitor the lighting in the room in real time and make adjustments to your display dynamically.

Rather than re-hash the capabilities, Keith Cooper did an excellent write-up of the Huey.

Where the Huey falls short is that it’s software seems incapable of addressing a secondary screen. Most high end graphic artists have video cards that provide dual monitors. And the most painful thing to see happen is the dragging of an image from one monitor to the other and seeing the whole color space be different. Dual monitors are supposed to be an extension of the workspace.

The Huey only calibrates the primary monitor. Sure, you can do multiple machines, each with it’s own primary monitor, but if your desktop looks like the scene from the matrix, you’re out of luck, even though both OS X and XP allow independent screen profiles.

If you are determined, persistent, and lucky, it is possible to save a calibration setting, swap which monitor is the logical primary, calibrate, save, and switch back, then manually load those profiles. However, this isn’t always workable as the screen calibration drifts, not to mention it’s affected by the ambient light as well… hence the reason the Huey has a room light sensor.

Given that this is a software issue, not a hardware one, combined that most graphic cards these days support dual monitors, I think the oversight (please tell me it’s not deliberate) is an atrocious one.

Despite that, if you’ve got a single monitor system, or you do all your graphical editing on a single display, the Huey is a wonderfully quick device that does its job well and is highly portable. Professionals will want better, but the professional consumer (prosumer?) will find the Huey enjoyable and non-intrusive to work with.

The only other downside is to get software updates, you have to register online.

Walt gives the Huey color calibration device from Pantone a thumbs up, but hopes they add dual monitor support.

On Black Friday, I purchased a small handful of 1GB micro thumb drives from Staples for $7 each. These were SanDisk U3 Smart drives labeled Cruzer micro 1.0GB, model BB0609O3B, SDCZ6-1024. They got a retractable USB plug and illuminate when connected.

The idea behind U3 technology is to do what many geeks want: keep a small collection of useful applications like Firefox, a virus checker, and so forth on a portable device without having to go through the installation process. If they simply put the special version of the applications on your disk preloaded, I wouldn’t have a problem with it.

The problem, however, is that U3 is invasive. The thumb drive comes with two partitions on it. The second partition, while small, is marked as read-only, and includes an autorun file which starts the U3 program, putting it annoyingly in the system tray on XP. Meanwhile, on OS X, a second drive image also mounts. Again, annoying.

The problem is you can’t re-format the device on either platform using the standard tools. OS X gets close, being able to see the logicals drives, partitions, and images. But, in well behaving Apple fashion, it refuses to destroy data it doesn’t own in configurations right out of the box.

While I’m looking for a solution that zaps the USB drive at the raw bit level, the only solution I’ve found is a specific U3 removal tool (which toasts all the data on the drive, so be careful) at these URLs, which reclaim all the drive space:

• http://www.u3.com/uninstall/
• http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1415

I know some thumb drives have the ability to password-protect themselves, making them literally read-only. I suspect that may be what’s going on, and hence the reason for the removal tool: it unlocks the device.

Aside from that, the drives themselves work quite well.

Got my first chance to do some serious playing with a finger printer reader, specifically the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader (USB) on XP.

Got to say, the device worked as advertised, recognizing my finger print in a number of configurations I wasn’t expecting it to be able to, and rejected untrained finger prints. While I doubt I’d use it for any serious production work of any sensitivity, it did score well on the coolness factor, though it’s certainly not a mandatory piece of hardware.

I would have liked to see more capabilities in the one-touch menu. While it would like to assist with web based logins, I’d rather have it start certain applications coded to different fingers. Even better, it would have been nice to have it wake the screen saver when touched.

Walt gives the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader a thumbs up.

The other night my seven year old niece came over and wanted to do some star gazing, so I grabbed my nice pair of binoculars, handed them to her, and we headed outside.

As we were walking through the front door, she bumped them against the door frame pretty hard. Now these are fairly expensive optics, and perhaps I should have known better. I didn’t say anything, but it must have been obvious from the brief sharp squint on my face that I had concern, as Madison looked up and apologized without prompting:

“Uncle Walt, I’m really sorry I bumped your binoculars. I didn’t mean to.” She paused for reflection, “I think it happened because I wasn’t paying attention.”

I was impressed by this very forthright and honest assessment on her part. “Are you paying attention now?”

She thought for a second, “I’d like to think so.”

Ah, if only we all could have this kind of open dialog at work.

The other day my original T-Mobile color Sidekick gave up the ghost from many years of beloved use. I depressed the wheel button, and it sank into the device, as if the little axle it spun on had broken. No amount of twiddling was able to fix it, and I had to admit to myself that it was finally time for a new phone. As it was, the backlight had pretty much all but given out anyhow.

I picked up the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 and transfering my SIMM and account could not have been easier. The process took about 5 minutes from phone selection to leaving the store.

I was not happy with the fact that I lost my applications such as the SSH Terminal. I guess I couldn’t complain, given that I got in when those applications were free. Now that I’m working for a company that thinks having Internet access is a good thing, I really haven’t had need for it anyhow. Sigh; I’ll still miss it.

I was surprised to learn that my phone also served as a camera. The old Sidekick had this little camera device you plugged into the side. This one was built in. And it was better. And the phone has a memory stick, so you can store your photos there. Neat. The phone also has the ability to hook up to the computer, act as a hard drive, and store MP3s there as well. Nifty!

This more than made up for the fact the keyboard layout had changed and it felt like typing inside of a deeply recessed box. I’ll get used to it.

But my real excitement perked up when I saw the phone was BlueTooth enabled, and I was even more happier when the Mac was able to pair up with the phone with virtually no effort and certainly no problems. My hopes, however, were dashed as I saw the phone offered no services my computer could take care of.

Turns out the solution was The Missing Sync, which takes the Mac OS X calendar, address books, and to do lists and beams them to the T-Mobile server, making my phone match my address book …and my address book match my phone.

The first problem I had there was that the Sync failed with a really obscure and useless error message. A little research showed that T-Mobil’s server gets really unhappy if the First and Last names are both blank. At least one has to be filled in, and this is not necessarily the case with any Company records. So I munged my Address Book on my Mac into conformance.

The sync worked. But it also brought in “duplicate” records from my phone, which was expected.

So, I spent a while combining records so that I had the superset of all information, trying to get everything with the most recent information. A second sync worked great.

But that’s when I noticed that my icon for my record in the address book had changed. It defaulted to one of the standard OS X icons, instead of my photo.

I tried to change it back by taking my picture with the built-in iSight. Nope, though it did update my login account picture. Then I tried dragging an image file to it. Again, it changed my login image under Preferences, but it did not change my address book picture. I tried changing my image from the login preferences screen, and that didn’t work either.

Eventually I stumbled on the solution, after finding relatively little on Apple’s support site.

Click the picture, press Delete, and it will disappear. Then use any of the methods above to put a new picture in that spot. Worked great.

I was recently approached for assistance with getting an older machine that refused to boot Windows back online. I’ve made the point pretty strongly that I don’t do Windows anymore, in particular because system recovery from catastrophic events is tedious, time consuming, often incomplete, and provides no guarantee that it won’t happen again. And now, thanks to WGA, catastrophic events are even more frequent than when we just had viruses to contend with.

Most of my clients seem to believe there’s some magic wand or setting it takes to bring things back, and few are willing, or able, to provide compensation for the hours of work it takes, much less have the technical ability to keep things in a working state after I’ve left them — even with training. They lack disclipline nor see the need, figuring if it goes south, I’m on call. Well. I’m not.

The real hitch is when you’re dealing with kind old ladies or close relatives. While you want to help them, often you can’t. Support and licensing models have changed. Gone are the days of simply fixing a machine even if they have the disc on the table. MS doesn’t support the older operating systems like they do XP, clients often can’t afford what you recommend to them as the bare minimum needed, and even if they could, their computer can’t run the new stuff… and an expensive new computer is out of the question. Microsoft’s executive staff may be made of money, but students, elderly, young parents, and average American families are not. A machine is big investment, so is the OS, and they expect it to last for over a decade.

In this one case, however, we had the system restoration disks from the OEM vendor, but the problem there was that a restoration would wipe out the data on the drive. Not good.

Apple, bless their heart, allows you to archive your whole system, and install on the same drive as your data without losing it. No such luck here. This was Windows. Licensing, not technology, was getting in the way.

The solution, it turned out, was to simply move the data to another Windows XP box. The way we’d do that, since he couldn’t boot, would be to pop the IDE drive out and use a BYTECC BT-200 USB 2.0 TO IDE converter. Oh, you want one. I own two. This thing makes an internal IDE drive mountable as easily as a USB thumb drive.

And so we did. However, when we plugged his drive into a working XP box, we did not get the result I’d seen every time before. What we got was disk spinning, blinking lights, and a Windows box stating the drive could not be mounted.

We even tried another USB port. Same thing. XP could not read this drive, and the most likely suspicion was a hard drive failure.

But, on the off chance, I suggested we try something. We simply moved the USB connector from the XP box to the Mac OS X box. Within a second the drive mounted perfectly. What was this? XP couldn’t read a Microsoft formatted drive, but OS X could? Yes, OS X saved the day. Again.

We proceeded to copy everything off the drive onto the Mac without incident. Just for fun we put it back on XP. Same deal, XP couldn’t mount it. And, this was a fully patched high end XP system.

Meanwhile, back on the Mac we reorganized the files, ran a few shell scripts to automated the sorting and pruning process, and when done burned three cross-platform DVDs.

Please don’t quote me for saying this, but it was the first time ever that data recovery was actually… dare I say, …fun. I don’t mean like, “oh it worked and we didn’t lose a thing”, as I’ve done that zillions of times before, but no, I mean like enjoyable play kinda fun.

The next thought was to put the drive back in the old box and reformat it with the OEM disk, and bring the data back. However, I was stopped in my tracks. It seemed a trip to the Apple store was suddenly in our future. For, if data recovery was the easy and enjoyable, imagine what working in an environment like that would be.

As for the old box? I suspect very soon wit will be running a copy of Xandros, a Linux distribution that is designed for Windows users to run Windows programs.

Purchased an Epson Stylus C84 printer a while back. On the up side, it works with XP and OS X. On the down side, it came with no USB cable. On the really down side, it sucks ink like crazy.

And in the this-printer-totally-sucks category, the ink clogs and there’s relatively little you can do about it, causing the printer to become a paperweight after about 9 months.

Which I had checked Google first, because this is a common problem.

Only one link provided any hope. Even then it wasn’t trivial.

What I did get out of my Google searching was a good laugh. Some do-it-yourselfer-dumbass went to clean his ink tube, and lacking the correct cleaning solution to pour in the tube, decided to try a can of compressed air instead. He makes a passing note that “you will get ink all over yourself.” Just the visual of when he pulled the trigger, coating his face in permanent black speckles, made me laugh so hard my sides hurt.

Walt gives the Epson Style C84 a thumbs down.

To undertand the significance of this post, you have to understand my parents. Dad has been using Windows for quite some time, and getting him to move from DOS to Windows to NT to XP has been a painful, painful, painful journey. For whatever reason, Windows could never survive under his watch — the machine would slow to a crawl, mysterious things would happen, meanwhile virus checks and spyware would show the system clean. Mom, meanwhile, had no interest in computers and would call me up to look up something for her and read it to her; attempts to put her in front of a machine didn’t go well at all.

A few days ago, dad announced he was done with Windows. He wanted a Mac, and so we sat down together and figured out what he needed and ordered him a nice mid-range Macbook Pro. The instructions, I thought, were fairly simple: when it arrives, don’t do anything with it until we get together and I can show you around.

Well, I’m writing this post because that didn’t happen. And the story doesn’t go in the direction you think it might. Without assistance, not so much as a call to me, he fires up the Mac and configures the operating system, without incident. Though he reports he “lost his Mac” — and where I took this to be some code that something went wrong, it turned out it was code that something went terribly right.

He showed my mother the laptop. Remember, she can’t use Windows to save her life. She’s near retirement age, which provides more context, and goes to bed around 7pm. Apparently she stayed up until 2am playing with it and surfing the web… something she’s never been able to do before.

In my mind, that says a lot. It says that Apple’s got it right. That a complete computerphobe can acclimate to be functional in less than an evening, and enjoy it.

Back to dad: clearly someone who’s never used a Mac before is going to encounter problems and confusion, especially if they have precanned expectations that things ought to work like Windows. My intent is to catalog his issues, and the solutions, so that others making the switch will have some help from someone who’s been in the same shoes.

Look for a link here in coming days.

I used to own an old Panasonic DVD player, it was awesome, built like a fortress, and had nothing but spectacular performance. So, when “new” DVDs came out that were packed with more dense data that it couldn’t play, I decided to upgrade to the Panasonic DVD-S35.

It was one of the worse home theater decisions I’ve ever made in my life.

The model wasn’t cheap either. The box claimed it was loaded with features. But everything from the terrible design of the remote, to the terrible interface for skipping around and fast forwarding, down to the inability to still play some discs made me regret the decision thoughout the lifespan of the product.

Only thing was, I didn’t realize just how bloody short that life span was going to be. Less than 2 years.

Mind you, most computer-related devices will run continuously for well over a decade. You know this to be true because that old personal computer you have shoved the back of the closet still works if you plug it in — that’s why you haven’t thrown it out. You had problems parting with your television, and moved that upstairs. Your old stereo, you regifted to a friend when you stepped up to surround sound. And DVD players are no different, except for this one that comes out of the box nearly DOA.

About 6-8 months in, the device started freezing on movies. We thought this was dirt and dust on the disc, but the disc was always clean. Reinserting it, ejecting the disc, or power cycling the player always seemed to fix it.

Until today.

Today the unit won’t play any disc we put into it, reporting an H02 error. A little research online showed that meant the spindle was no longer turning, so it couldn’t read the index, so it couldn’t tell a disc was in the unit.

The solution was simple. Take the cover off, get a surprise at how little there is inside, wonder why they made the box so large and empty, and wiggle the white spindle with your finger. Magically, it would free up and start working again.

We plugged it in, and it recognized the first disc we put into it and it started to play! Until about 30 seconds in, when we got an error H07.

Enough is enough. The Panasonic DVD-S35 is enough to ruin your faith and trust in the Panasonic brand name. Everyone is having this problem.

This last weekend had a root canal, and my friend Marcus came over to check up on me to see how I was doing. The pain killers had kicked in, so I was up for an adventure.

What did Marcus want to do? Buy an Apple MacBook Pro, just like mine; he had played with mine, saw all the neat features, and loved the fact that it really could run XP at the same time (in addition to other operating systems, too!).

Now, in theory, the Apple Store and the online Apple Store are supposed to be the same for pricing. And, well, they are. Sorta.

The online store is far more up to date with the newest inventory.

There’s a hidden implication in that statement — and that is that the physical Apple store has left over inventory, so sometimes you can get a better deal, just by asking.

As it was, we were looking for the latest 15″ MacBook Pro with the faster processor, larger video memory, larger hard drive, and single 1GB memory stick instead of two.

But just as the physical Apple store has extra inventory, they don’t have the capability to configure the machine exactly as you want it. And there was the problem; the models the store physically sold were configured differently than the options we’d carefully crafted online.

Marcus decided to go with the “lesser” laptop that was identical to mine.

The guy ran to the back, and came back with the laptop and then made the announcement that the store was doing a silent upgrade. The models that they had in stock were larger processor, larger video card, larger disk space, and single stick memory — all at the cost of the lower end model!

The sales guy confessed that this happens all the time. If they don’t have enough low end machines, you pay for the low end machine, and they give you a high end machine. So, it’s always best to check a physical store first — you may get a better deal!

Speaking of deals; while there, the Apple store gave us a free photo printer for buying the machine.

We went back to my place, added all the OS X extras that come with the system, downloaded all the free goodies online — and Marcus was up and running in roughly about 2 hours. That’s a full system install from scratch, fully networked, and with a ton of applications and extensions. Including the ability to install his XP disc when he got home.

The next day I get a call from Marcus. Nothing was wrong. His sister had seen his laptop, fallen in love with it, and she wanted to get one too — only decked out with everything, including the 17″ display.

We went out to eat — and found free Wi-Fi. We came back home and connected the machines together in a little network; it was trivial.

There’s something highly infectus about the new laptops that makes a PC person want one after playing with it.

In assorted news, my nephew turned 4, and for his birthday party I brought over the laptop to let him take some Photobooth pictures. What was surprising was that he just sat down and started using the Mac with no instruction other than wanting to know where the button to “click the mouse” was since he had never seen a touch pad. He opened a number of apps and started playing movies. –At the age of four, having never seen a Mac before.–

UPDATE: Have to quote Marcus, who sent me an email…

Software? Missing? HAHA…um, you saw how sparse my software was on my XP box upstairs. I can already do more than I was ever able to do with my XP machine. Oh! Oh! Oh! AND!!! I haven’t had to put in but 1 liscense key…gotta love that! I don’t feel like I’m criminal for using software I own now.