Juniorbird.com

It’s coming down to crunch time if you’re celebrating Christmas. Nothing’s better for last-minute gifts than software — you can just download it, buy a license, burn the installer to a CD, and slip that in the ol’ stocking. You don’t even need to leave the house and brave the parking garage (unless you need to go to Best Buy to grab some blank CDs, that is!). But the question is: what do you get the geek who has everything? Or, worse, what do you get the ordinary person who doesn’t care what they run on their computer? Well, everything below is cool in the way that getting things you do everyday done easier and quicker is cool.
h3. Password Manager
How do you remember all of your logins for everything you use? For most people, it’s either use the one password for almost everything, or use the password reset function over and over again for all of the passwords you’ve forgotten. You can save your passwords using your browser’s built-in “remember” functions but, unfortunately, there are security exploits that attack these.
The best solution is to use a password manager. The gold standard for the Mac is “1Password”:http://agilewebsolutions.com/products/1Password, which also offers a great iPhone companion; I’ve heard a lot about “RoboForm”:http://www.roboform.com/ on the PC. “KeePass”:http://keepass.info/index.html is an open-source alternative.
The best thing about all three of these guys is that they don’t just store passwords, they store things that you use all the time like your contact info for forms and your credit cards for purchases.
h3. A Launcher
If you use more than just the 3 or 4 programs, you probably spend a ton of time digging around in the Mac Application folder or in the Start menu for just what it is that you want to launch and use.
A specialized launcher makes things more convenient. I personally like the keyboard-activated launchers; with these, you hit a key combination, start typing the name of the program you’d like to launch, and hit return when the right one shows up. On the Mac, you have “Quicksilver”:http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver or “Launchbar”:http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html; on the PC, I used “Launchy.”:http://www.launchy.net/
If you prefer a visual approach using the mouse, try a visual dock, which allows you to organize icons of programs into categories on one or more docks that you can show and hide. I used to swear by “DragThing”:http://www.dragthing.com/english/about.html on the Mac back in the OS 8 and 9 days, and “CoolTabs”:http://www.alerma.com/cooltabs.html appears to be a pretty equivalent knock-off for the PC.
h3. A “Site-Specific Browser” or Browser Just for Web Apps
These days, we do more online all the time — check our mail in GMail or Hotmail, calendars at Google or Yahoo, Salesforce or SugarCRM to manage our business, Mint to track the finances, and more. But it sure sucks when that site you found in Twitter crashes your browser and knocks out real work in Google Docs or, heck, shuts your music from Pandora off.
That’s what the Site-Specific Browser, or SSB is about: it’s a simple Web browser that just runs the one site. It sounds banal, but just try it out: set up one site that you use every day in one, and see how nice it is to have it as a separate application, rather than a tab in Firefox or IE or Safari. On the Mac, “Fluid”:http://fluidapp.com/ lets you create a specific instance of Safari[1] for a specific site; on the PC, “Prism”:https://mozillalabs.com/blog/2007/10/prism/ lets you make an instance of Firefox.
An added bonus: if you use a launcher, then create an SSB for a site you use often, then you can get to that site in that SSB just by typing the name of that site into the launcher. That’s one step to get to Yahoo! Mail, not the three of open the browser, type it in, and hit enter.
h3. Hootsuite!
Speaking of Web apps, “Hootsuite”:http://hootsuite.com is a great Twitter Web app that I’ve been using for a while. It plays well with multiple accounts in Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and more, and even with Facebook Pages; it makes great use of Twitter’s new Lists; and it makes scheduling tweets for the future easy as pie. Plus, it’s got an adorable owl as its logo.
h3. Mac Users: Expel Winmail.dat
If you use a Mac, you’re probably used to getting the inscrutable winmail.dat attachment from a Windows-using sender. Rather than pleading with them to “send it again!”, solve the problem yourself with “Tnef’s Enough”:http://www.joshjacob.com/mac-development/tnef.php, which lets you browse inside that winmail.dat that you just got.
h3. Notetaker
There’s few thing that I use as often as my note-taking program, “Yojimbo”:http://barebones.com/products/yojimbo/. Sure, it lets me organize notes with categories, tags, and colored labels. Better, it takes not just text but images, PDFs, Web pages, and even (I love this one) serial numbers. But best of all, it’s just one keystroke away — hit that key combo, and up pops an input window that takes in any kind of input you could want, without having to step out of whatever it was I was doing. That means that it’s easy for me to capture an idea or an important piece of information anytime, anywhere, which means that I *do* capture that, rather than letting the friction of my tools prevent that.
So, geeky, yes, but a good new program can be something your giftee uses every day. Try out some of these programs this holiday season.
fn1. I realize it’s WebKit, not Safari, but that’s not a useful distinction for most of my readers.

I live in a “cool house”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003702.html. It’s not large, except apparently by the standards of WiFi networking. For an urban elitist liberal like me, being separated from my Gmail or “Photobomb”:http://thisisphotobomb.com/[1] for as much as a few hours would be… disastrous. Plus, I work out of the garage, so I have to get e-mail[2] there. Thus, my quest: cover the property with WiFi.
There’s a little backstory here, too. My last place was a tiny little house, barely 400 square feet, but I set up WiFi as soon as I moved in back in 2003. And it was all great for about a year and a half, until my neighbors discovered that I had unsecured WiFi and all started using it. Then, everything was glacial. So I got a new router, one with actual password security on it, and locked everyone out. And then the Internet was all mine, and fast, again.
Which was great for about a week, which was how long it took 8 or 9 of my neighbors to set up their own WiFi networks. Now, I lived in one of those high-density urban neighborhoods, with about 170 people within a 100-foot radius of my house, so those 8 or 9 networks were all right on top of mine, and the interference from everyone’s WiFi routers slowed everything right down again. Kind of like when you hear your neighbor on the baby monitor, but, in this case, when your neighbor talks that kicks you off of “Autocomplete Me”:http://autocompleteme.com/.
So I did the only thing I could do: I decided to have the most powerful network in the ‘hood.[3] I bought a repeater and attached a separately-powered high-gain antenna and I just burned through all of my neighbors’ Gnutella downloads and “IM sessions”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/001475.html. I won’t lie, it made me feel a little big.
And then I moved here, which was great, because, what with all of the neighborhood being houses, there wasn’t much interference, and the repeater and high-gain antenna did just fine. Until they didn’t. Starting in about June, and starting at about 10am, reception just dropped off a cliff. I measured the speed a bunch of times and it was seriously about as fast as a “56k modem”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/56k_modem, if you remember back in 1997. Come 4 or 5 pm, bam, back it would get to normal broadband.
Now, there’s speed that’s too slow to watch “MMA Depot”:http://mmadepot.blogspot.com/, and there’s speed that’s too slow to check e-mail, and we were in that latter bucket. So I did the only thing I could think of: I boosted the power of the network.
That got throughput to peak at “ISDN”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isdn speeds, if you remember back in 1999. So then I decided it was time to pretend I knew something about radio and make up a solution to the problem.
I was pretty sure that this was a problem with interference, not a problem with my cable Internet — when things were slow, I couldn’t even ping other computers in my house, much less reach the Internet; if it had been Time Warner’s fault, then I would’ve easily pinged other computers in my house. So, when you have interference, you switch frequencies, right?
So I switched from the older 802.11g WiFi protocol to the newer 802.11n protocol. What’s the difference? I don’t know, they seem to use the same frequency, but n is supposed to be faster so I assume they use that frequency differently. Still, no luck.
OK, so I switched my 802.11n frequency completely from the lower 2.4GHz of 802.11g and n to the 5GHz of 802.11n and a, since n (unlike g) allows that. Great, right? Things were _fast_. Except that higher frequencies penetrate physical objects much worse than do lower frequencies. And, even with a repeater, the WiFi signal barely made it to the living room, much less my garage.
Bereft of ideas, I prostrated myself upon the altar of Steve Jobs, who makes products that seem to Just Work, and went out and bought every single “Airport Express”:http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0015YJOK2/ref=nosim/wadearmstrong-20 they had at the Fox Hills Mall Best Buy[4] and set them all up as repeaters of my 802.11n network at 2.4GHz and… it just worked.
On the one hand, I feel a little dirty, like a good geek would’ve rigged up a directional aerial out of tinfoil and paper towel rolls. On the other hand, it just works. I may not like how the man tucks his turtlenecks into his dad jeans, but that Steve Jobs makes surprisingly good products. And that means that I can read “Uni Watch”:http://www.uniwatchblog.com/ in the office and find out about amazing sites like “this one”:http://www.nasljerseys.com/Jerseys/Jerseys_NASL_Teamlist.htm. And that makes it all worth it.
fn1. Or “Awkward Family Photos”:http://awkwardfamilyphotos.com/, or “Ugliest Tattoos”:http://ugliesttattoos.com/.
fn2. Or “Pandora.FM””:http://pandorafm.real-ity.com/login.php
fn3. This was, indeed, the “‘hood”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003498.html
fn4. That is, two.

I have this dream, a very, very hopeless dream. My dream is that someday I will be able to print greeting cards on my very own color printer, featuring the photos that I took my own self. OK, so I have small dreams. The point is, I’d pay to live this particular dream. And that worked for parasailing, so I don’t know why greeting cards would be more difficult.

One option is to just buy a bunch of nicely-printed cards. The photo host I use, “Smugmug,”:http://juniorbird.smugmug.com, offers some real nice ones, but I have to buy a bunch, and most of the time I just need one, for a birthday card or whatever, and then I want to try to pick just the perfect picture for that card. So I make my own. Now, I have Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign and, worst of all, I actually know how to use all of them. I even have the occasional clever thought,[1] so I might could come up with a card design. But it takes much longer to put a nice card together than I would really like to spend on it, so I usually end up bored of the process and come up with something kind of half-assy.
What I’d really like is a simple program with a couple of dozen designs that I can just drop my photos into, then print something out on my color printer. Easy, right? Except I’ve tried a good half dozen greeting card-printing programs and have found the following problems to exist pretty much all at once in every single one:
* Doesn’t actually print anything but full-page
* Card designs worse than your average free MySpace page theme circa 2006
* Can’t rotate, crop, or otherwise fit your pictures
* Can’t add text
* Card designs only allow you to use one photo, or seven photos, or some fixed number, but there’s always only one fixed number in the whole program and you’re just stuck with it, pity if you didn’t want five photos on your card
* All help and manual text in “Engrish”:http://engrishfunny.com/
I can’t imagine this would be a difficult program to make, compared to some that are out there, and the upsell possibility of additional card designs is massive. Won’t somebody please take my money?
Until then, I’m stuck paying a vendor a chunk of money for a bunch of cards when I really only need one. There’s only one reason why this should be: somebody’s paying the indie developers off. Must be them all are getting a cut of the big online print-on-demand greeting card industry. They’re around every corner, those printers.
fn1. _Let’s not get overly optimistic here_ — Ed.

I’ve been using a Time Capsule to back up my Mac for some time now, and have been very satisfied. I was wishing that I could run some kind of over-the-air backup for my wife’s laptop, which runs Windows XP, too. So I attached a USB hard drive to the Time Capsule, and tried to mount that on the Windows XP laptop. First I did it the wrong way, and there was much sadness. Then I did it the right way, and life was easy. I couldn’t find a description of how to do it right in a quick Google search, so here’s my story. It’s probably true for an Airport Extreme Base Station too, since that and the Time Capsule are similar.
h3. The Wrong Way
Apple advertises that you can “share disks attached to its wireless routers using the AirPort Disk Utility”:http://www.apple.com/airportextreme/features/harddrivesharing.html, if the clients are either Windows machines or older Macs. So I downloaded the AirPort Disk Utility, ran it, and easily mounted the disks.
Then I restarted, and the drive letters assigned to the disks changed. Obviously, that would be a problem if I tried to run backup software, which would try to copy files to a given drive that might or might not be there.
h3. The Right Way
So away went the AirPort Disk Utility, and instead I:
# Went to the *Start Menu*, and opened *My Computer*
# From the *Tools* menu, selected *Map Network Drive*
# Picked the *Drive Letter* I wanted
# For the *Folder*, typed in *[IP Address of Time Capsule][Drivename]* — so, if your Time Capsule was at 192.168.1.1, and your backup drive was named George, you’d type 192.168.1.1George
# Hit *Finish*. And there was the drive!
So, if you want to consistently connect your computer running Windows XP to a USB drive attached to a Time Capsule (and probably and Airport Extreme Base Station), you need to do it through Windows XP, and not through the AirPort Disk Utility. Simple!

OK, love letters to technology are fun, but the downside of any new thing is that it’s not entirely identical to old things. Here are four things that I’ve had on “past cell phones”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/003831.html that I really miss — or at least haven’t found — for my iPhone.
h3. Profile Change Based on Calendar
Back in the old days of my Nokia 3650 running the Symbian Series 60 OS, I had a clever program that automatically changed my phone’s profile based on things on my calendar. Interrupt a meeting with a loud ringer? Never, since the phone automatically changed my profile to “silent” when it found the word “meeting” in the current calendar event. Clever!
h3. Canned Text Responses to Rejected Calls
Virtually every phone lets you send a text to the caller when you reject their call, but, back when that was a brilliant idea, I had a program on my Treo that had canned responses that you could send too. “I’m in a meeting, please call right back if it’s so urgent that I need to break out” is too much to type when you’re supposed to be paying attention to someone else, but not much to select from a menu.
h3. Bright, Over-Saturated Photos
Let’s face it, with the exception of a few phones, cell phone cameras are at best decent. Thanks to autofocus, the iPhone can give you some pretty clear, crisp lines. But the best way to hide a flawed photo is to give the eye something else to look at! The 3650 took awful, fuzzy, color-shifted photos that were nonetheless oversaturated and high-contrast. And that made them fun to look at, even if they were tiny and low-resolution.
h3. App Categories
The iPhone interface is actually very similar to the old Palm interface, except, rather than giving you just a few screens to keep programs on, the Palm let you assign categories to your applications and display one category at a time. The best part of this was how easy it was to match an app and a category. Selecting the Category menu item brought up a list of all of your apps, each with a category pop-up next to it. Select the desired category in the pop-up and you were done. You could categorize a single app in a second or re-categorize everything in just a minute or two. On the iPhone, shifting things around means dragging icon after icon past screen after screen — disorganization’s easier.

Perhaps I didn’t blog because I didn’t have anything to talk about! If that’s the case, then apparently getting a new iPhone is going to give me something to talk about. Because I love my iPhone. It really is a clever device. In fact, it reminds me of my last truly clever phone: the Nokia 3620.
h3. In Which I Bore You With a History of the Cell Phones I’ve Owned
My first cell phone was a really awful Motorola. It was maybe the least cool phone in the world. I didn’t know anything at all about cell phones beyond that I wanted a free phone, which meant you got very little back in 1998. I picked the C520 because it had a big screen — somehow the nice people at Moto used only one line of that big screen for any information at all.
!http://imagesb.ciao.com/iuk/images/products/normal/273/product-87273.jpg!
I replaced that briefly with an Ericsson that was beautiful but didn’t work because it didn’t actually support the Cingular network, even though Cingular had sold it to me. After deciding that I had to actually have a conversation on my phone, I grabbed a stylish Nokia 8290. You know, from back when cell phones were tiny and going to become small enough that you could lose them in your pocket because they were dwarfed by the pack of gum.
!http://i93.photobucket.com/albums/l74/mzr786/8290/1.jpg!
Deciding that my phone was a tool, not couture, I upgraded to a Nokia 3620, my first smartphone.
!http://www.symbiansoftware.us/bin/d/nokia_3620.gif!
Thence I switched to a Treo, and, after that was stolen, to a Palm Centro. Capable, full-featured, sure, but not brilliant in any particular way. Tools that worked, more like.
h3. What Makes the iPhone and the 3620 Brilliant
The iPhone reminds me of the 3620. Compared to what we think of as a smartphone, the 3620 wasn’t much. It had only your classic 0-9, * and # keys, and, of all things, Nokia decided to put them in a pretty circle rather than your usual configuration, so the thing was harder to use. It had exceedingly mediocre predictive text input that I turned off pretty quickly. But it had a big, bright screen, it synced with my calendar and address book, and, best of all, a thriving developer community. Thousands of programs were available online, and I could download them and install them directly from my computer! Wirelessly! Over Bluetooth! In 2003!
What was great about those programs was that they accepted what the 3620 could do, so they aimed to do very little — but do it well. I had timers,[1] note-taking programs, an outliner, games, and even a personal finance program on the phone. I think it’s really the finance program that illustrates what developers did on the 3620 vs. the Palm smartphones that I got later. Since the 3620 couldn’t do a lot, the finance program was very simple — it was just there to record the transactions you did. Balances? Budget? Feh! All you could do was enter transactions into your credit card or checking register (unlimited accounts supported); then, at the end of the month, you could export the activity to a Quicken import file. It worked perfectly for me: since the phone was always with me, it was always easy to enter my transactions.
Then I switched to the Treo, which had a touchscreen and a full keyboard. Treo developers thought it was so brilliant that it should be a whole computer, so the personal finance programs there kept every little piece of data for me — budgets, balances, etc. Except it was never really _that_ good to peck away on the Treo keyboard, so I never wanted to use one of those programs. Hey, they were overkill — I just wanted to enter my transactions! Few Treo programs were as brilliant as the 3620′s.
Now, the iPhone has no such hardware limitations, but it does have a price limitation. Everything seems to cost $0.99 in the App Store, which means that no developer has the incentive to make a big, complex program. Instead, most every app does one thing and does it very well. And that’s something I love about the iPhone; there are few things better than working with beauty.
fn1. I like to time my tea. To make sure it’s brewed perfectly. What’s the point if you don’t make it right?

I got home from a recent week-long trip to find no cable. Worse, it had gone out just after I left, so I got home from a recent week-long trip to find a Tivo full of nothing but “Just a Moment, this Channel Will Be Available Shortly.” Time Warner took two whole days to come out and fix it. I could almost hear the babies crying, such was this tragedy. My poor, empty Tivo!
So, strapped for things to watch, I turned to “Hulu”:http://hulu.com and “Netflix”:http://netflix.com. It’s not the first time; I think I’d seen an episode or two of The Office on these services, and thought it was pretty cool. But there are limits to what I want to watch on my computer screen. Or, so I thought. Turns out not to be so true. The tiny little Hulu pop-up window — maybe twice the area of a YouTube video — fits perfectly in the corner of my screen, making it easy to revisit old _Babylon 5_ episodes.[1] Netflix doesn’t have that handy little feature, but it has helped me get into _Heroes_, all while I do other things. Well, pretend to do other things.
Anyway, it’s been great, except there’s no UFC content on Hulu. Hint, hint, Dana White. I’ll have a few seasons of some good shows under my belt in no time.
As for the cable TV, the nice man from Time Warner came by and plugged it back in. Former IT manager that I am, I never checked to see if the coax was actually hooked up to the cable box. I think that means I’m executive material. Either way, I’ve hardly even looked at Tivo since.
fn1. I never claimed to have good taste. Actually, it’s great, I barely saw _Babylon 5_ when it was on TV, because it was all on somebody else’s schedule. Tivo freed me from those schedules, and Hulu does the same.

I write this blog on a two-year-old Dell Latitude D600 laptop, a laptop which, I am now informed “may”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/28/another-dell-laptop-ignites/ “vent”:http://community.tomshardware.com/dellpost.html?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=192887&ex=Dude-Dell-freaking-blew “with”:http://kd7lrj.blogspot.com/2006/07/dell-laptop-battery-trouble-at-novell.html “flames”:http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32550 — or, if you’re not a technology marketer, the battery can explode and catch on fire. Given my “previous level of satisfaction with Dell products”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000646.php, you can believe that I’m super-excited and happy about this development.
Now, in all fairness, this is apparently not Dell’s fault — Sony made the faulty batteries (just like they made similar flaming batteries for “Apple’s PowerBook 5300″:http://www.tidbits.com/tb-issues/tidbits-295.html#lnk2). And Dell has put up “a Web site that helps you check if you need a new battery and ships you one”:https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/Default.aspx. Much to my surprise, my two-year-old laptop — which has thus far been flames-free — qualified for a replacement. Since the D600 has been available for 30-some months, I wonder how unlikely a fire is, or, alternatively, how many battery fires there have been so far. I hope the answer is “not many”, because it’ll be 20 days before I get my new battery.
It could be worse, other models take up to 75 days to have batteries ship, and Dell recommends that you remove your battery until you get the new one. Not having a battery in the computer at all won’t make much of a difference in my battery life, anyway, since Windows usually fails to go to sleep, or wakes up for no reason, thus keeping me down to about 5 minutes of useful battery life for the last 9 months or so. However, I have become accustomed to the freedom of moving my laptop from my office to the living room, when I just want to hang out and relax in front of the TV, or to Starbuck’s or the juice place, when I want to do work away from my little office. But then I wrote half of a draft of this entry, decided to move from my living room to my office, unplugged my laptop, and there went 350 words. This will be a strange new lifestyle to get used to; or I may just brave the fire and leave the battery in. The world, after all, is a dangerous place anyway.