The MacAlba

Living in rural Australia has many benefits over town dwelling. I use my photoblog to illustrate what I see around me on a daily basis. I couldn’t go back to living with neighbours again. I fully understand that some town/city residents can make an equal statement and not understand why somebody would want to live so far from “amenitiesâ€? such as shopping centres, cinemas, night clubs, etc. Each to their own.

One of the real disadvantages of rural living, though, is the lack of the level of telecommunications connectivity that many in the western world now take for granted. We have no copper-based telco services to, or near, the house. Mobile phone coverage doesn’t extend to the house.

The telephone connection that we do have is connected via a microwave link. It gives good dial up modem connectivity, but that’s its limit. With three computers on the home wireless network, all sharing the dial-up gateway, bandwidth can be hard to come by at times.

So, I’ve taken a step forward and ordered a two-way satellite network connection. I mentioned this in an entry on my ham radio blog last week, but I now propose to document the move to two-way satellite on this blog in case others are interested.

Being mindful of my higher than average monthly download needs, and my desire for a static IP address to permit me to connect to a home server from afar or make a VPN connection to work via the corporate firewall, I ordered a 512/64 service with a 5 gigabyte monthly quota from Bordernet. This particular class of service permits me to burst up to a monthly cap of 8 gigabytes at little extra cost before the more prohibitive per-megabyte charges apply.

I was told that I could expect the service to be installed within four weeks. A week has now passed and I haven’t heard anything (I’m just impatient). I had expected, though, to hear from the installer to determine how much of an impediment the nearby small hill and trees, that I had mentioned when ordering the service, might be, and how large a dish mount might be required given that it can get pretty windy around here at certain times of the year.

So I’ll just have to sit back and wait. Being somebody who has strong views on customer service, or the lack thereof, it’s more likely that they’ll hear from me by the end of next week if I haven’t heard from them.

Technorati Tags: Internet

Something that annoys me is the presumptuous error message that appear with Windows XP after a reboot. I get a message telling me that the firewall is off and that I should click an icon to “fix the problem”.

What problem? I have a firewall ahead of the Windows box and so don’t want or need to use the internal Windows firewall on my small home-office network. So I turn off the Windows one. Why does Microsoft assume that it’s an error?

Surely the language could be more neutral and say something like “You may not realise that your firewall is turned off. Click here to adjust the settings”.

A few months ago I reported on four Firefox browser extensions that I found invaluable. Today, an update.

Firefox v1.5 was released a little while ago. Some of the extensions I had been using hadn’t been upgraded, at that time, to work with Firefox v1.5. Rather than stay with the then superceded version of Firefox, I upgraded to v1.5 and revised the list of extensions I used.

Instead of the four previously used, I now use only two:

• I replaced the Google Toolbar with Googlebar Lite
• I replaced the the functionality provided by Tabbrowser Preferences and SessionSaver with Tab Mix Plus

I don’t bother now with a Bookmarks Synchronizer. For the time being I manually save the bookmarks.html file from Firefox’s internal bookmarks manager.

Some weeks ago I upgraded my Mac Powerbook from Panther (10.3.9) to Tiger (10.4.2). As I am wont to do at times, I switched to use native (ie supplied by Apple) applications. I started using Safari as my browser, Mail as my mail application, and Terminal to pop up shells on the various Unix/Linux/FreeBSD boxes that I use.

I don’t have any problems with any of the above Apple-supplied applications; they all do an good job. But, given that I use my Powerbook for the better part of 14 hours each day, I had come to appreciate, or even reply upon, many of the features of the applications that I had previously been using. So, just today, I reverted to Firefox, Thunderbird and iTerm as my respective browser, email client and terminal application of choice.

Along the way I auditioned Camino, Shiira and Opera as replacement browsers, but as good as they were they didn’t have the edge afforded me by Firefox which lets me browse in the manner in which I want to browse. I use four extensions written for Firefox – they make a difference for me:

• Google Toolbar for Firefox
• Bookmarks Synchronizer
• Tabbrowser Preferences
• SessionSaver

So, Firefox is fit for purpose. My purpose. Your purpose will probably be different. “Horses for courses“.

I’ve just installed the latest version of Apples iTunes – v4.9. The obvious new feature in this version is the ability to subscribe to, download, and manage podcasts, and again obviously, the podcast feature can leverage on iTunes ability to load the audio file onto an iPod.

I have a long time interest in podcasting having first started my own, the lookANDsee photoblog podcast, on August 25, 2004. I have used a variety of podcast clients, most recently the one build into NetNewsWire. Whilst the latter suits me very well I was curious to see how iTunes copes.

There’s an immediate visual clue with a new playlist titled “Podcasts” with its own purple icon (at least on a Mac). Clicking this playlist brings up a typical iTunes playlist screen, and a “Settings” button. This button is a shortcut into the Preferences menu for Podcasts. Here you can set update frequency, how many podcasts to download if the feed is new, how many to keep, and which and how many to upload to an iPod.

Next, I went looking to find how to subscribe to a podcast. That had me stumped for a minute of so until, while I was methodically working through the menus, I found it under “Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast”. The podcast’s feed URL gets inserted here.

Then, perhaps anticlimactically, it operates just as you’d expect. the latest podcast is fetched, loaded into the playlist, and you then can listen via iTunes or upload to the iPod.

Being on a lowly dialup connection, I haven’t downloaded much as yet. The acid test is to take it on the road and give the iPod menus a workout. I don’t expect any problems though.

Some of the iTunes Music stores will also let you pick podcasts. The UK store doesn’t, but the USA store does, for example. My own podcast “lookANDsee” can be found using the search facilitiy and shows up in the “Arts and Entertainment”, “International”, and “Audio Blogs” sections. I clicked the “Subscribe” button, and, Voila!, it appeared in the iTunes Podcast playlist.

Update: The UK store now shows “Podcasts”.

On the downside, having noted that the URL for my podcast is an old “podkey” one, I went to update it via the “Publish a Podcast” button. I input my preferred feed URL; OK; I gave it my Apple ID username and password; OK; then it wanted me to register an iTunes account; bummer. Being in a country that has yet to get an iTunes store, I couldn’t get past that hurdle.

Oh well, for a version 1.0 model it’s pretty good. I await version 1.1.

Do you sometimes get SPAM email that isn’t intended to be SPAM (although that’s always debatable)?

On a sadly more and more frequent basis I receive emails from reputable companies telling me that I’ve been selected to receive a free subscription to something or other – usually a magazine, an audio book – or special discount offer. I usually ignore these emails (if my anti-SPAM filter hasn’t already consigned them to the Junk folder) as I’m wary of such offers in the first place.

Of late, though, I’ve fallen for a couple of freebie offers – the magazines and source emails and web sites given are, after all, quite reputable. So to the crunch. Remembering that I’ve been personally selected to receive the goods (as if), I go to sign up — only to be told at that point that the offer is only valid in the USA. Don’t these guys get a clue from my work email address, the one with the .au on the end, that I’m not in the USofA? Haven’t these reputable companies gone to the trouble of filtering the country codes from the data they’ve already collected from me? I can only assume that they’re lazy – it’s easier to just blast email at everybody than actually do some work and remove those addresses that aren’t part of the target group.

I do the only thing I can — I remember the due consideration they’ve (not) given to me as a potential customer and reward them by not purchasing anything from them unless I really have to. A small gesture, I know, but at least I feel a bit better.

Over the past few years I’ve gained experience with Microsoft Windows XP, RedHat Linux (Fedora), Debian-based Ubuntu Linux, and the Mach/FreeBSD-based Mac OS X operating systems on various laptop computers.

It will come as no surprise, I imagine, for anybody to learn that the least reliable was WinXP. Both the Linux and Unix operating systems acquitted themselves admirably in operation. Indeed, the Mac PowerBook I’m currently typing on has never crashed in the 6 months I’ve had it. I’ve had to reboot it a few times after applying certain software updates, but it’s given no unexpected equivalent of the “blue screen of death”.

The version of RedHat Linux that I tested required me to tweak the video configuration to get X-windows working at optimal resolution, but thereafter it was fine.

Of special note is the Ubuntu linux distribution. Unlike WinXP, Ubuntu installed itself on a Dell X200 laptop and managed to select appropriate drivers for the video, sound and wireless cards. In contrast, after installing WinXP on the Dell X200 laptop, several additional Dell-supplied drivers had to be manually applied, one after the other – a tedious, moderately non-intuitive process. Ubuntu is living proof that linux distributions have matured. Ubuntu is all but ready for the average computer user.

There’s not much in it, but for the non-technologist out looking to purchase a new computer, unless they have specialist software requirements, I’d recommend an Apple Macintosh system. For somebody who’s not afraid to experiment a little, I’d recommend Ubuntu linux.

Either of the above will give a more virus-free existence than the Microsoft alternative.

Some time has now passed since Steve Jobs announced that Apple was moving towards using Intel’s chipsets to run Apple’s OS X operating system. We don’t know just yet exactly which Intel chips will be used but the chances are that it won’t be a common or garden x86 variety.

Reactions to Jobs’ pronouncement have ranged from blazing hot, to the coldest of cold. For my own part, I don’t particularly care what hardware Mac OS X runs on. I interact with the operating system, not the hardware. That’s where the “user experience” lies for me.

Over the years I’ve used DEC’s OSF/1 operating system on RISC and Alpha chips (yes, version 1.0 of OSF1 ran on RISC), DEC’s Ultrix on VAX and RISC processors, Sun’s SunOS/Solaris on Sparc and X86 processors, and even Linux on x86, Sparc, and PowerPC chips. So I have no problems with using Apple’s OS X (or whatever it’s next named) on something other than a PowerPC processor.

Will this be a business risk for Apple? It’s hard to say just yet. If enough people are like me and don’t care, the risk is low. For others, the fact that OS X currently runs on a non-Intel processor is a differentiator. When Apple moves onto Intel then Apple may well lose those users as they may switch to an operating system other than OS X.

One reason for the move from IBM to Intel is touted to be the ability to run Intel chips on laptops at a higher speed than is currently available, with a reduced power budget, and, hopefully, at reduced cost. I fully support such a move.