Software

Jim just showed me a bitchin’ cool Mac trick:

If you press Shift, the Apple (”command”) key, and the 4 key at the same time, it will change your mouse cursor into a targeting device. Then hit the space bar and your cursor will turn into a camera icon. Use the mouse to move the camera over any window and left-click. Bam! That will create a screen capture as a .png file on your desktop.

While we were waiting for the Olympics to start out here on the West coast, we caught the end of an old Entourage episode on HBO. The track playing over the end credits was Sinnerman, by Nina Simone. That song is also played during the conclusion of The Thomas Crown Affair remake with Pierce Brosnan, which has been on television a few hundred thousand times lately, and I really like it. This time I remembered to email a note to myself from my iPhone to download it.

Since Phelps isn’t racing until 10pm, I decided to grab the song. I’ll gladly pay $.99 for a track on iTunes, so I fired ‘er up and … ugh … Of course that’s one of the “album only” songs. For some mysterious reason every now and then Apple (or the record label, or who knows) sets it so that some songs cannot be downloaded individually. You have to buy the whole album to get the track. While I’m okay to shell $.99 for a great song, I’m loathe to drop $9.99 for an album when I only want one song.

So of course I flip iTunes the bird and fire up Limewire. But for some reason, even though there are apparently hundreds of copies of that song available, none of them will download. (I suspect my ISP is blocking Limewire, actually.)

Torrents to the rescue. I found a copy on torrents.to, fired up Transmission, and should have the whole Thomas Crown Affair OST in about twenty minutes. This is why I love the Internets.

This morning I discovered what is possibly the world’s most annoying iPhone bug. For some time now I’ve been trying to determine why every now and then I seem to sleep right through my alarm. The iPhone alarm can be set to be tragically loud and uncomfortably annoying, so the fact that I have frequently not heard it at all was a mystery. Until now.
Here is the bug:

If you receive an SMS message and do not acknowledge it — because you’re fast asleep, for example — the iPhone alarm will not execute until you clear the SMS notification.

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I really can’t say enough good things about Adium. This awesome little Mac app lets you connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, iChat, and GTalk instant messenger contacts all in one place. It is the holy grail of IM clients. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am thoroughly pleased. (It’s also hosted by the rockin’ cool team at Network Redux.)

Warning! Do not be fooled by what you might read anywhere on the Internet. If you have been using Microsoft Money and you switch to a Mac, you are screwed. There is nothing comparable for the Mac. No … Quicken is not an option. No, there is no version of Microsoft Money in development for the Mac. No, there are no other software programs available which are even remotely similar. No, none of the other potential financial software programs will allow you to successfully import your MSMoney data. No, you are not going to find another financial software application that is freeware or shareware or open source that comes close to Microsoft Money. No, you should not believe any website that attempts to explain how to convert your Microsoft Money file(s) for use in any Macintosh program.

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It takes four actions to enable Bluetooth on the new iPhone.

1. Click “Settings”.
2. Click “General”.
3. Click “Bluetooth”.
4. Click on/off slider.

Leaving Bluetooth enabled all the time drains the battery much too quickly, so it makes sense to only enable it when you are using it, and to disable it when you are finished. (The same could be said of 3G network access.) Hopefully in the next release of the software they’ll make it easier to flip these two settings. I mean, I know it’s not world hunger or anything, but four clicks is at least two too many.

The restore I did yesterday on my iPhone failed to fix the problem I was having with the camera. Even after completely wiping the phone and resetting multiple times, the camera simply refused to save photos to its internal file system. I was ready to just complain at a Genius Bar in an Apple store this weekend (when I will no doubt be getting the new iPhone anyway), when I decided to do one last Google search for an answer. And, of course, Google provided. I followed the advice of olemono posted on April 22 and now the camera works again!

Seek allows for ‘faceted browsing’ of email and looks, pretty much, like the coolest thing to hit email since the @ symbol. It’s Thunderbird only, though. At this point I don’t know if it would be possible for me to abandon Outlook. The email functionality I could take or leave, but the address book and calendar are so entwined in my life there’s no way to chunk them. I need to be able to synch with my iPhone … mumble grumble … <rolls up sleeves> … must to do something …

About six months ago I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160 GB USB External Hard Drive from the evil empire™. As far as hard drives go, well, it’s big and it stores data. So in that regard it performs perfectly. It also has a soothing amber glow that pulses while it’s spinning, which is very nice. The problem with this thing is the software. It’s two sacks of rotten apples bad. And, based on the 1994-esque, we-hate-our-visitors Seagate website, it’s not going to get any better.

I’ve been returning to the site every few weeks, hoping that they’ll release some sort of upgrade or patch, but no. The software that’s bundled with the drive is the FreeAgent Launcher. Like almost all new software, it lives in the systray. To kill it, you have to right-click on it, choose exit, and then confirm when it asks, “Are you sure you want to exit?” (This annoys the hell out of me. If you insist on treating me like I might be slightly retarded — Why would I click “exit” if I wasn’t sure? — then at least give me an option to not have to confirm next time.) In a fit of desperation I installed the software for one of Seagate’s other drives. The other software is Drive Manager or something like that. It also lives in the system tray. Get this, though: To kill that one, you have to left-click and do the “Are you sure?” dance. Why would Seagate make one work via right-click and the other work via left-click?!
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When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

Yesterday I became the proud new owner of a Dell D630 Latitude. Today I began the tiresome task of transferring my life from my old D610 to it. The old laptop was Anchor. (Previous computers were Budweiser, Guinness, and Corona.) The new laptop is Maui. Here is a list of the software that Dell decided to install on my new machine that I either immediately disabled or deleted:

• Google Desktop
• Google Toolbar
• AOL Setup
• Intellisonic Speech Enhancement
• the “language” taskbar toolbar
• Dell’s Wireless WLAN Card monitor

A friend of mine sent me a link to an iTunes song he thought I’d like. Of course I was unable to open it because it came delivered as an attachment. (Cue scary music.) Microsoft thinks that I can’t possibly be trusted to not open some flesh-eating virus, so by default Outlook blocks everything. It’s usually one of the first things I “fix” when I get a new computer. Here’s how to do it …

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From the Department of Inexplicable Corporate Decisions: Pocket PC integration discontinued with Microsoft Money 2007.

Washington — At least two federal government agencies are refusing to upgrade their computers with Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Vista operating system, citing concern over costs and compatibility issues.

In a Jan. 19 memo to staff, Dan Mintz, the Transportation Department’s chief information officer, imposed an “indefinite moratorium” on upgrading desktop and laptop computers with the new operating system, Office 2007 and Internet Explorer 7.

Mintz wrote that there is “no compelling technical or business case” to upgrade to the new products and specific reasons not to upgrade.

Think I’m crazy for saying there’s no reason to go to Vista right now? At least a small village’s worth of friends and family have asked me if I’m upgrading to Vista, when I’m upgrading to Vista, whether they should get Vista on their new computer, and why the hell am I not all excited about Vista. I’ve told each and every one of them that I’ll upgrade to Vista someday, but not in 2007. XP works just fine for me, thank you. I don’t have the time or the patience to spend half my working hours for the next six months installing service patches and emergency updates. I’d never buy the first year of a new model of car and I’ll not upgrade my OS the same year it’s released. My operating system is probably the only thing in my life that I choose not to have on the bleeding edge. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to be an early adopter.