Here I was, being a good iTunes user and buying episodes of Heroes as I had time to watch them. Now, halfway through the season I went to download the next episode and received instead an error message. Heroes is no longer available in the US store. What's up with that? No warning nothing.

Normally I have been pretty happy with Apple customer service but if they could have at least sent an email to those who have purchased some of the season I would have been happy to purchase the rest before the deadline. Now I am halfway through the season and can't find where to get the rest of it to watch on a Mac.

Tags: Heroes

So far I have not been too impressed with the quality of MacOSX Leopard's iChat Theater. Whenever I have an iChat to another Mac on the local network (that is not running Leopard) the quality of the photos or shared files is extremely low. The only hint I could find was to increase the Quicktime streaming setting on both sides of the iChat connection but that has not improved anything.

The only other suggestion I have come across so far is that it works fine when it is a Leopard on both sides of the iChat. Hmm. Apple had promoted it as being usable with the Tiger MacOSX version for example but they meant to say "barely usable".

Tags: iChat Theater

Since I already have a WDS network main station (trendnet) that I thought it would be easy to use the existing WEP hex password like I did with my Airport Express (simply take the hex password and add a "$" before it.)

Unfortunately the new Airport Extreme only allows 13 characters in its WEP Transitional Security Network so I could not get all of the long string of hexadecimal characters in from my old password. I could not use the old WEP password either for some reason.

Finally I thought I would make the new Airport Extreme's WEP Transitional Security Network and then take that hexadecimal code and put this into the old Trendnet device. My problem was that I could not find the hexadecimal equivalent of the password I typed into the AirPort Utility software.

I finally found out how to retrieve this hexadecimal code from the Apple support site. After you have entered a password into the Airport Extreme you can get the hexadecimal version of it with the following steps.

1. log onto the Airport Extreme using the Airport Utility software


2. select the "Base Station" menu item from the top of the screen/ window


3. select the "Equivalent Network Password"


4. and voila, a little window will appear showing you your WPA Password/ ASCII WEP Key and it's hex equivalent.


5. take this hex code and enter it into the other side of your WDS connection.

Now my DSL modem offers the Internet through my Trendnet wireless bridge at 54mbps and my MacBook can log on to the Airport Extreme at 130mbps with 802.11n to access the Internet and the rest of my local wired network.

Note: I have to use WEP for the WDS since I cannot get the Trendnet device to authenticate with anything better.

Tags: Airport, wds

Of course the first thing I did with my Airport Extreme base station (7.2.1) was to try to share a USB hard drive over it. What I found was that the shared disk drive would not automount on my new Leopard MacOSX system. Fortunately after much searching I found my answer on the Apple Forums. You basically had to remove the Airport utilities and reinstall them from the Airport Extreme Installation CDROM.

1. In System preference > Acounts > Login Items, remove Airport Base Station Agent
2. Reboot
3. On the hard disk Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices delete the Airport Base Station Agent and Apple80211Agent
4. Reinstall the Airport Extreme software from the Install CDROM
5. In System preference > Acounts > Login Items, add Airport Base Station Agent from its location in the hard disk Macintosh HD > System > Library > CoreServices folder
   

After the next reboot the USB drive should auto-mount again.

Tags: Airport Disk

Although Apple's Airport Extreme can share a printer it was not quite so easy to use from my Vista Business computer. The instructions from Apple had me able to print only half a page to my USB HP Deskjet. Then the print job would error out. To make matters worse I could not delete the print job either.

So, here's what worked for me and hopefully for anyone else with this problem.

1. In your Printer Properties > Ports tab, disable "Enable bidirectional support". This allowed me to delete the print jobs.
2. In your Printer Properties > Advanced tab, disable "Enable advanced printing features". This allowed me to print whole pages.
   

I don't know if it will work for every printer but I can now print from my Vista computer.

Tags: printing, Airport

Well, maybe you know this already but at least the older versions of Outlook like 2000 use the web browser Internet Explorer (IE) to render the HTML emails. So what? Well, Outlook also takes the page margins as defined in IE and uses thoses when you try to print an HTML based email the header uses the Outlook margin settings and the email message uses the Internet Explorer margin settings.

If you have your IE margins set tozero then when you print your emails your printer will probably cut off the left side of your message (even if your print preview looks okay). In that case you need to be sure that your Outlook and IE margins are configured the same.

Tags: Outlook, Html mail

I was eligible and registered for a low price MacOSX 10.5 Leopard upgrade because I had bought my Macbook in October. The upgrade would probably be sent a few weeks after the Friday release date, I had thought. I was still looking forward tothe new release and followed it on their website for the release.

Late on Friday I received an email from Apple saying that my MacOSX upgrade had shipped and that I should receive it in a couple of days. Sure enough, I received it a few days later. I did not expect such great coordinated service, especially considering that I live in Switzerland. Way to go Apple!

Tags: customer service

Apparently this is not as easy as one would think. I have my virtual Windows XP running in VMware's Fusion software for MacOSX and I had picked a virtual drive size that was too small. There is apparently no easy way to simply enlarge the virtual drive.

Fortunately I also have Acronis's True Image Home software for making clones of your hard disk. I simply created a new virtual drive of the size I wanted and used True Image to clone the old drive to the new drive, True Image will automatically resize the cloned drive to the size of the destination. It went fast and smooth and I could simply delete the old virtual drive afterwards.

Tags: VMWare, increase disk

Since upgrading from XP Pro to Vista I have lost count of the times that what I am working on freezes and a dialog appears saying that Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer or some other software has "stopped working". The next step is to close every instance of that software and restart what I was doing.

On top of that, coming back from hibernation is messy, at least with Microsoft Outlook 2007. The software simply jams. I cannot even use the task manager to kill any instances but have to restart the whole computer to get access to my email.

What makes all of these problems even more evident is that whenever the new User Account Control appears, the entire screen blacks out like it is going to reboot making me nervous and start looking for the blue screen infos. I would have thought that with all of the new graphical look, a message that can appear rather frequently could look a bit less stressful.

So overall, I have not been impressed with the new stability of the Vista system though some of the new features are nice sticking with XP Pro seems to be the surest way to go for me.

Tags: Vista, Stable

In the morning it was working fine and in the afternoon no lights, no signal, nothing. It just up and died after a good 2 years of service. I have no clue but I think it is simply a rock now. I was kinda hoping for a little longer lifespan to my apple product but it was also after about 2 years that our ibook started smoking. Maybe that is the new Mac low-end lifespan with the Applecare being so expensive it is still cheaper than replacing the device after 2 years.

Fortunately we still have our Trendnet access point which has been going strong for the past few years.

Tags: Airport express

Although the features have seemed to get ok reviews on the Internet, no one seems to be talking about the limitations of this software. Being a paid user of PowerDirector 6 I thought I would state a few problems in hopes that people will be aware of them before they purchase the software. (all of the support is done on a private email basis, so there are no public forums to see what other users are experiencing.

Here is a simple list of limitations that I have come up against. I will try to expand the list as I use the program.

• files are not upgradeable, this means that something you make in PowerDirector 5 will not be usable in PowerDirector 6
• PowerProducer is very sensitive to file placement. This means that if you move one of your source files (for instance a video clip to another hard drive) the PowerProducer file is unreadable with no way to fix it (unless you remember what the files were and here they should go)
• Templates from one version are not compatible with a different version. For example, if you purchase DVD templates from them for PowerDirector 5 those templates will not be usable in version 6.
• Although templates can be edited, there are limitation. You cannot add or make new navigational buttons or navigation destinations and you cannot seem to make new title boxes either.
• Sometimes a jpg photo file from your digital camera may be readable on your computer but it will not be readable by PowerDirector.
• PowerDirector5 could sometimes get large amounts of clips/ photos out of order in the timeline when adding or changing a clip.
• PowerDirector 6 installs 4 DIVX shareware packages that supposedly should not be uninstalled because PowerDirector uses some of the codecs in the shareware installations. However you can delete from your desktop the links like "Buy DivX for Windows" and are not obliged to buy this shareware to use the PowerDirector software.
• The new subtitle feature of PowerDirector 6 can only make one subtitle track (the text does look very clear on the previews, a good thing)
• These Cyberlink applications always tries to connect to the cyberlink website when you start them up. The latest PowerDirector has an option to deactivate this connection but earlier versions do not seem to have this option.
• Personally I had a lot of trouble burning the DVD directly from the software and would simply make the DVD folder and use NERO to burn the actual DVD. Ihave not retried this with the latest versions.
• You cannot install 2 versions of the software at the same time. This means that if you had a photo album with custom movement on it the only solution is to either manually write down everything you did to every picture and recreate it or as their technical support recommends, render everything out to video from the old version , uninstall the old version, and then import it into the latest version.
  

Although there are no public forums (that would be a great way for users to help each other) they do respond rather quickly to technical support questions. So far always well within the 24 hours they state on their site.

In my personal opinion, they do somethings well but with these above limitations (especially the first) they have a ways to go before becoming a solid video editing utility.

Tags: cyberlink, powerproducer, powerdirector

I have a HP laserjet 1100 being shared on my Windows XP SP2 machine and I wanted to use it from MacOSX 10.4.9 without doing anything fancy. This apparently is a little harder than it would seem. I finally found two solutions of which I preferred the first (HPIJS).

• Install Foomatic/HPIJS
• Install Gutenprint
  

Once you have installed one of the two print engines above, you can use the standard Add Printer dialog of MacOSX 10.4.x and browse for the Windows XP machine in the correct workgroup, select the shared printer and choose the correct driver for it (the HP 1100 driver was installed with one of the above two print engines.)

Personally, I found the Gutenprint drivers to have a little too much contrast and boxiness in them. These problems did not happen with the HPIJS drivers.  Gutenprint had many more customization options so maybe enough test prints could give me a better result.

In the standard print dialog, you might also need to manually set the Printer Features option to enable high resolution printing (and then save it as a preset to avoid setting it again.)

Tags: printing, Shared printer, XP

If you picked up a 10.4.x macbook with the 512mb thinking that it would be more than enough then you probably found your MacOSX running a little slower than expected. This was the case for me and when I ran the Activity Monitor (Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor) I quickly saw that my system had about 8mb of free memory.

Although the Activity Monitor will show you exactly what software is taking up your precious memory, here are the two things that I did to help.

1) disable all of my widgets
2) used the Font Book to deactivate all Asian fonts

That helped me free up about 100mb of memory though I am sure a better solution would be to dish out the $$ and get some more memory.

Tags: memory, Optimize

When I needed to make some simple 3d models of objects I started looking for some cheap (free) software to use. I know there is blender, art of illusion, wings 3d and a few others but they really seemed a little bit much for my simple needs. Then I came across the free SketchUp 6 software from Google.

Although the interface was not always obvious on what it was doing or could do, I found everything I needed searching through their online help or by watching their training videos. The only downside is that the free version can only export to the proprietary SKP or KMZ file format.

Google does offer a free viewer software for Windows and supposedly the latest version of Blender can import the KMZ file and then export it into another format. Otherwise you need to pay $100's for the Professional version of SketchUp to allow export in a few 3d formats (3ds, DWG, OBJ and more) or buy the Deep Exploration Standard Edition from Right Hemisphere. Deep Exploration additionally allow you to export the native SketchUp format to MANY other 3d formats while allowing some okay 3d manipulation as well. Unfortunately this also costs $100's.

Regardless, I found the quick manipulation of objects in SketchUp to be easy to learn and useful for creating quick visualizations.

Tags: Sketchup, 3d, models

This is incredibly hard to do. With my Dell laptop it is 1 screw and a removable drawer. With the ibook it is 20 pages of instructions and about 1.5-2 hours of work (PDF). There were so many screws and thin metal panels that it would be pretty easy to mess up too. Fortunately, since I was not planning on using the ibook again (I just wanted to extract the hard drive) it was a bit less stressful but I would not recommend doing this yourself. Pay Apple to do it and be sure it is done right or upgrade your Mac.

Tags: iBook

After a couple of great years with our G3 ibook, one day the screen stayed black and soon smoke started coming out of it. Hopefully the hard disk is okay but what really scared me is that this computer is often plugged in for long periods of time being charged. I had assumed that it had been approved as a non-fire hazard but looking on Google there seems to be many other examples of ibooks burning up (along with other laptops).

How much of a fire hazard are these laptop computers? Can I really leave them charging when noone is at home. I can easily see where airlines would want to ban them if they are a fire hazard, I mean if smokers cannot light up who would want a lithium battery melt down ocurring in the seat next to them.

Tags: Smoking, defect

So, I upgraded my SATA PCI card in my Windows XP Pro computer and now all of my Adobe products are saying that they have become deactivated. Instantly none would work and would offer me the chance to activate over the Internet. The newest product that I had just purchased reactivated quickly but another, Indesign CS2 said there were too many activations and that I needed to call in to get a number change.

The automated phone system kept saying my numbers were incorrect. After 2 tries I decided to try the option to connect to a service agent, at which point the system hung up on me.

I do not consider this a way to treat customers of their expensive products. I am loosing work because of this very impressive activation process. I can only hope if I add memory to my computer or a newer firewire interface that everything will not break again. At least they could add a warning that your Adobe programs will become deactivated if you change anything about your computer. At the very least they can inform me of mow many activations I have left.Even my After Effects trial was instantly deactivated.

I'm trying again but I'm just listening to "What a night" and other music from their phone service instead of finishing work for my clients. Thanks Adobe.

Tags: Adobe, Activation

After nearly 3.5 years, the Apache Foundation has released a stable update to their FOP software. This is great news for people using this free java program to convert XML to PDF files. More information and the download can be found at http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ Among the many changes and fixes are the following.

• support for the use of Open Type fonts


• support for SVG in fo:instream-foreign objects for RTF output


• support for PDF/A-1b and PDF/X-3:2003


• support for kerning


• support for XMP metadata


• lots of bug fixes


• including a complete redesign of the FOP codebase

I did have some problems following their instructions to install my own fonts. Here is what I finally did after copying the fonts I wanted to the FOP directory. NOTE, with this release you can skip step one and go straight to step 2 if you are using a TTF font.

1. Correct font conversion process after copying the font files "something.ttf" to the directory where FOP is located.
   C:\downloads\fop-0.93>java -cp build\fop.jar;lib\avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar; lib\commons-logging-1.0.4.jar; lib\commons-io-1.1.jar org.apache.fop.fonts.apps.TTFReader arial.ttf arial.xml
   TTF Reader for Apache FOP 0.93Parsing font...
   Reading arial.ttf...
   Number of glyphs in font: 1674
   3 cmap tables
   CMAP format: 4
   Creating xml font file...
   Creating CID encoded metrics...
   Writing xml font file arial.xml...
   This font contains no embedding license restrictions.XML font metrics file successfully created.


2. Uncomment this in the userconfig.xml file in the fop directory "conf"; if you are using a TTF font you can also delete the "font metrics-url=" portion for each font as this will be generated automatically.
   <font metrics-url="arial.xml" kerning="yes" embed-url="arial.ttf">
<font-triplet name="Arial" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
<font-triplet name="ArialMT" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
</font>
<font kerning="yes" embed-url="arial.ttf">
<font-triplet name="Arial" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
<font-triplet name="ArialMT" style="normal" weight="normal"/>
</font>


3. In the fonts.fo file located in the fop directory/examples/fo/basic, wherever you see font-family="Helvetica" change it to font-family="Arial".


4. C:\downloads\fop-0.93>fop -c conf/userconfig.xml C:\downloads\fop-0.93\examples\fo\basic\fonts.fo fonts2.pdf

Now there is finally a new stable release to export my docbook xml files with. If only they could get the floats feature working. PS, I have a package of tools for working with fop and xml docbook on Windows if anyone is interested.

Tags: fop, docbook, Apache, PDF