Going backward: iBook exchange battery
My
iBook came with one of those "dangerous" batteries, due for a recall. The procedure was rather swift and easy. But due to me being in different places than UPS expected me to be, the process of actually getting the contraption to me took rather a long time.
Apple's excellent helpdesk sorted all this out in a very patient matter. Having said that; every call took regarding this took well over 30 minutes, so a quick process, it's not.
The old battery had a life in it of a little over four hours. So I was a little surprised to see that the new one would let me work for just barely three hours.
Onto the phone again with Aplle as I was not a happy fellow. After again some 30 minutes on the phone, which included a lot of holds of the person having to go back to the second level, the verdict came out: "Three hours is acceptable and we will close this case, so you can never call us again on this issue." Thank you Apple.
But then came the next little bit of advice:
Completely discharge the battery 'till it goes to sleep and then charge it for twenty-four hours. And do this three times.
Indeed it does work. I am back up to just four hours. This advice however seems to be undocumented. Nowhere on the web was I able to find this piece of advice. Especially not the 24 hour charging time.
One of pieces of knowledge that only goes around on helpdesks, and is nowhere else to be found.
Extended Desktop on 12' iBook
With the amount of development work I have been doing off late, the need for the use of a second screen was greatly felt. My 12' iBook is every bit the workhorse I expected it to be. But the lack of screen-space was gets to you after awhile.
Seen the fact that it just mirrored a second screen, I started looking for a possible hardware add-on that should make this possible. The built in video-card would not allow for desktop expansion. Right? Wrong.
A simple Google-search led me to a software hack, that would make a dual-screen setup possible. As it turns out the ATI Radeon Mobility video card has the capability, it is just switched off by Apple.
So downloading the Screen Spanning Doctor from the site of
Klaus Rutemuller oughta do the trick. It is an open firmware hack and. The accompanying documentation comes full of warnings. Firmware updates and BIOS flashes always make me somewhat apprehensive. What if...
This little program runs as a script. So I took all my courage, downed an extra beer, noted down all the essential URL's in case my beloved iBook would die on me and off I went.
Well, run the thing, go through some dialog boxes like: "do you really want this?" and "do you want clamshell mode?" (no I don't), restart and you're in business.
Opening up the display preference pane suddenly has an extra tab called "Arrangement". Clicking that opens a display selection pane on the second screen with all the resolutions and refresh rates the monitor/card combo will support. Even the 1920 x 1440 resolution of my Sony 420GS. With my somewhat decreased eye-sight I settled for a comfortable 1600 x 1024.
So now I can have a few browsers running at the second display without having to go to the dock all the time and knock out code on the iBook.
Quirks? I only found one. Opening a contextual menu on the extra playing field opens it on the edge of the iBook screen.
Pig's Heaven I believe it's called.
A list of
supported iBooks, iMacs and eMacs is provided. A few older ones aren't, as well as the MacMini's. For the not so faint of heart you may download this convenient little thingy here:
http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ScreenSpanningDoctor.dmg
Opera Handheld CSS quirks
Over the last week or so I devoted some time to help develop a site intended to be specifically run on a certain type of mobile device sporting Opera Mobile as a browser. Despite the Opera site claiming that it supports most of the CSS 2.1 specification on this, it turned out to be a peculiar experience.
The "small view" in Opera provides a great help. In our case we needed the 8.5 version as this was closest to what what used on our little machine. That in turn took quite a search.It is on the Opera site, but is not easily found.
Once the proper
media="handheld"
and the correct XHTML doctype were inserted, we were on our way.
Than strange things happen, some block-type element started to push
divs
apart (unfortunately the way the site was designed we needed a lot of those. Completely insensitive to any styling apllied to those. Zero margins and paddings did not help our
h1
tags.
h3
turned out to be fine however.
More annoying was the fact that small images completely disappeared. Through a trial and error method I found that anything narrower than 29px wide was send into oblivion completely. Take 29px wide or higher and you are in the clear. The same thing turned out to be true for images used as a background-image in CSS. You can see how that does influence the design process.
Also styling applied to links was completely ignored by our little friend (showed up in thee Opera small view mode, but went back to the oldskool blue, purple default on our device.)
There is a case to be made for both irregularities. Mobile browser tend to do away with a lot of things they consider unnecessarry. In order to keep rendering-times at a minimum and to squeeze everthing on a small screen, and make things readable at the same time.
However, when you are trying to make something looking good, this is not a great concept to work with.
It makes perfect sense that when a mobile browser gets presented with a
media=screen
CSS, that it will knock out tons of stuff you don't need. Then deleting smaller images make sense, not rendering background-colors too, defaulting to standard link-styles possibly too.
But when such a browser is confronted with a handheld media type, one might expect that it would started to behave like a real browser and not run into quirks like these.
As both site and device are not officially launched in this part of the world I will have to refrain from naming brandnames.
Symbol of honour
Only because I have been called just that by people that I hold in very high esteem is it that I dare to display the symbol. Click the icon for further explanation.
NY Arts Magazine
I am honoured to be mentioned in the "Tips and Picks" section of the september/october issue of the NY Arts Magazine. This is off course with my art and nothing css like.
Logitech Premium USB headset 350
I went on a quest to find a decent USB headset, basically just to use with Skype. The iBook does not sport a microfone-in socket, hence the desire for a USB solution. There is quite a few choices around, but they're hard to get on a short notice. So the choice was the
Logitech Premium USB headset 350.
Once you have managed to cut through the packaging (what is that? That you need to out the kitchen knives and scissors to get to your new toy?), it is a neat looking piece of gear. Sturdy built. Decent desing. Mic can be worn left or right sided. Pretty looking volume and mute control. Overal it looks it won't fall apart on short notice.
When we look at the package we have gotten ourselves:
Advanced Digital USB:
streaming audio provides superior clarity with the simplicity of a single USB plug and play connection,On the Apple I would have expecting nothing else than this to be easy. Plug it in, set the sound preferences to the immediatelly recognized kit and you're on your way. The claimed clarity seems on iTunes radio to be good. Great. On to the next item.
In-line volume and mute control. A round little thingy with a blue led that comes up when you plug and a silver ring around it with plus and minus signs comes with a clip to attach to shirt or whatever piece of clothing.
Pushing the plus and minus signs will bring up the volume control on-screen of OSX and works instantaneously. The centre part acts as the mute button and will just cancel out the mic, while the blue led starts blinking now. As the apparatus comes with around two meters of cable this is a nice feature to reach for the ash-tray or wine-bottle during a phone conversation.
Noise-cancelling microphone: filters out unwanted background noise, folds back when not in use.All true. Nothing to add.
Premium headband is engineered for superior comfort.Plush earpads provide hours of contineous enjoyment.When you look at the package you will notice the somewhat painful smile of the lady. Superior comfort and contineous enjoyment is probably true when you are into S&M. I'm quite sure the lady must have been wearing the contraption for over ten minutes.
Earpads are of some sweaty imitation leather filled something so soft that inner part will touch your ear. The tension on the headband definitely makes sure it will not fall off. A euphemism for your head being squeezed.
To cut it short: there is nothing superior about the comfort. Comfort does not enter into the equation at all. So the contineous enjoyment is only provided by the voice of your lover at the other end, not by this particular headset.
40mm Neodymium drivers: immerse you in your games and music.'I don't know what Neodymium is, nor do I particularly care. But it seems to promise good sound. Well, it is a lot of sound. A very in-your--face kind of sound. It drives hard, gives a lot of volume. And has a colouring that makes it very impressiuve.
My favourite headphone is a fifteen-year-old Sennheiser HD580 Ovation. Is it fair to pitch the USB 350 against this? Perhaps not, but we are talking here about listening to MP3's on a computer. Not Hi-end audiofile equipment.
Then apart from the wearing comfort, the sound on the USB 350 is tiring. There is no balance between the different frequencies. Though you would think this would suit rock, pop, hiphop, rap, r&b, any of these genres, it is not a beautiful sound. Classical and jazz is a downright disaster on this thing.
The verdict: This is a headset that retails at € 49,95, so something might be expected of this piece of machinery. It scores good on ease of use. Built-quality is good. Comfort and sound leave a lot to be desired. And that is a mild way of putting it.
You may find this thing on E-bay very soon, as there must be something that delivers better sound and comfort than this piece of ....
Skype wishlist
I love Skype. Well, not so much
Skype itself, it does exactly as any other voice connection. I do love what it does to my phone bills. And it does great things to it. Or rather: it does very little to it.
There are always things to be desired though. And concerns the managing of contacts. Grouping, not unlike MSN or any other
Messenger would be nice. The list is getting quite long and the name-search is good, unless you're in the "What was that guys name again situation."
Grouping could be one idea, searching on location might be another. Seperate directories?
It does not sync with my
Address Book on the OS X machine, which in itself syncs beautifully with my cell-phone. Meaning that adding new numbers involves a copying and pasting numbers and names manually. (And Address Book could use some more syncing features. Would be nice if it picked up the location or groups from my
Nokia).
Sure you can import contacts from the Address Book. A fuller, tighter integration in the best of Mac fashions is what I want.
And of course I wish that more people would use Skype, but that is a different matter all together.
Ligne #3
Ligne #3, oils on canvas, 50cm x 40 cm
Apple iBook vervangings batterij bestellen
Als je tot een van de 1.8 miljoen bezitters hoort van een Apple I- of Powerbook waar de batterij van vervangen moet worden, heeft Apple daar natuurlijke
een pagina voor.
Het kleine linkje rechts leidt je naar een engelstalige pagina die de serienummers van de computer en batterij controleerd en meld of je in aanmerking komt voor een vervangend exemplaar.
Is dat het geval dan hoef je alleen maar de naam en adres gegevens in te vullen en klaar is kees.
Ik kreeg daarna een melding terug dat de postcode niet juist was. Vele herhaalde pogingen wilde het niet laten lukken. Kleine letters, geen postcode, een 0 ervoor zetten in de veronstelling dat er een amerikaans formaat wordt aangehouden.
Pas het invoegen van een spatie tussen de cijfers en de letters geven het gewenste resultaat.
Dus 1015 XJ in plaats van 1015XJ
The new toy
There is always a good excuse to buy another computer. I used the fact that my very old 9500/250 had died on me. Did that quite a while ago, but I got by on my windows box. Being a long time (1989) Apple fanboy, I need at least one decent Mac.
Though secondhand, this 12' 1.2Mhz G4 iBook arrived. I am not gonna sing the praise here. All Mac-users know how good it is and I can not convince the windows-users that aren't converted by now of it's virtues ("This must be the most screwed up user-interface that exists", to quote one dedicated windows fan.)
Has it all been a big feast reverting back to the trusted Mac? It's has not.
The machine -dubbed OogAppeltje by now- came with a clean install of Tiger. As I needed the
X11 thingie to run
OpenOffice Ihad to install that. Pop in the installation cd and put in on. It turned out that a basic install of the OS was also performed. Not paying attention I am suddenly stuck with 10.3. (The installation disc supplied with it, were not of the upgraded Tiger nature). Not too bad a thing, if it weren't for the fact that in the process iCall, Safari and the Printer Utility died on me. Three apps that are quite crucial.
Complete installations did not help. I do apparently need to a clean install. Something I hate to do with all the stuff I already put on to it.
Another thing I am not happy with is Mail. Good program, but after being used to Becky handling 9 different mail-accounts, it is rather disappointing. It seems to wanna dump all accounts in one global inbox. Something I cannot live with. Thunderbird handles this well, but refuses to integrate with the Apple Address Book.
All this sounds rather depressing, but it is really not. I am sure that in due time I will get these inconvenieces to work. On the whole I am a happy person.
As an extra bonus Apple will replace my battery. Yes I do have
one of those. One big feast all around.
My iBook came with one of those "dangerous" batteries, due for a recall. The procedure was rather swift and easy. But due to me being in different places than UPS expected me to be, the process of actually getting the contraption to me took rather a long time.
