iPod Touch update

I'm relieved to report my enthusiasm for the iPod Touch as a replacement for the long line of Palm PDAs continues unabated. This little device continues to amaze me.

I managed to find this very useful article which helped me get secondary calendars in Google Calendar syncing with the iPod Touch. That was really the last piece of the PDA puzzle I needed to solve.

Tonight I downloaded the free Apple Remote application which allows me to control our Apple TV from the iPod Touch. It's not earth shattering but rather a bit of fun with a device which is already ranks among the best technical purchases I've made.

I typically find several reasons to be dissatisfied with any new gadget after a month of using it. Not so with the iPod Touch. It makes using a PDA type device fun again. I recall feeling this sense of enjoyment when I first started playing with most of the new Palm devices I've owned (aside from the Centro which was horribly disappointing).

By the way, the iPod Touch serves as a very nice music and video player in addition to its stellar performance as a PDA. It also works nicely to do some light web browsing at night. The mobile version of Safari is by far the most useful web browsing experience I've seen on a small device.

If you're in the market for a small device which can serve multiple purposes, investigate the iPod Touch. You won't be sorry.

Life after Palm

I've finally settled upon using my iPod Touch as the best PDA replacement device for my Palm. Having used Palm PDAs since I bought my first one at the employee price working for U.S. Robotics in 1996, I've come to rely heavily on a number of key applications to keep my life organized. Fortunately the iPhone application market has matured to the point that I could easily find replacements for all my "must have" applications.

First and foremost, I needed a way to sync my contact information from my Mac to the iPod Touch. Luckily, Apple anticipated that by adding that capability into iTunes.

It was also imperative that I be able to sync memos between my desktop computer and the iPod Touch. Mark/Space has a product called The Missing Sync which takes care of that problem for me.

It was also important that I be able to sync calendars between my desktop system and the PDA. Fortunately a combination of iCal on my Mac, iCal on the iPod, and Google Calendar was able to handle that thorny issue. This article on using CalDAV with Google Calendar and iCal helps explain the rather tricky configuration.

For a number of years I've been using a Palm application called SplashID to keep my passwords secure and yet easily accessible. The good folks at SplashData have created a version which runs on the iPod Touch. Using a new version of the same application made conversion very simple.

I've also grown reliant on having access to a simple database application on my PDA to keep track of things such as books I'm interested in reading as well as a number of other topics. I've used a great little Palm application called JFile for many years to fill this need. One of the best known names in Mac databases, FileMaker, has recently released a personal database application called Bento. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch version available which can sync with the Mac version of Bento.

The last important thing I required on my PDA was a way to read books. I'd been using the mobile version of Adobe's Acrobat Reader on the Palm. I discovered that there's a free product called Stanza Desktop which is available for both Mac and Windows machines. They also have an iPhone/iPod Touch version which can sync books from the desktop version. Couple this with the fact that Google Books has announced that they have over a million public domain books available in the EPUB format (which Stanza supports) and my needs for a PDA book reader is more than met.

It's been a bit of a challenge but I've finally got all these applications installed and my data transferred. The only problem which remains is I'm still not able to see subordinate calendars from Google Calendars yet. Aside from that, I'm very happy with the new device. It's thinner, easier to read, and has better battery life than my Palm did. Plus it functions as a very good music player to boot.

e-audiobooks rock!

For a long time I've been listening to audiobooks to make commuting or exercise more bearable. Our local library used to have a great selection of audiobooks on cassette. The last time I checked, they were slowly transitioning to CD based audiobooks. I never borrowed a book in that form as they only seemed to stock recent bestsellers and I don't find most recent books as engrossing as some of the old classics by authors like Nevil Shute, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Louis Stevenson among others.

Fast forward to a couple years ago. I discovered that our local library had started carrying e-audiobooks which could be downloaded to an MP3 player with support for Windows Media DRM aka protected WMA files). With mixed feelings, I purchased a refurbished MP3 player capable of playing protected WMA files. It irked me that I couldn't play this protected media on the iPod I used for most of my music. The MP3 player gave me a years worth of service before developing some interface quirks which became so bothersome as to be unbearable. It's hard to believe that with an iPod as a model of how to design a decent user interface, other manufacturers do such an abysmal job.

The refurbished replacement I purchased from another manufacturer was slightly better but still paled in comparison to the iPod's interface. It lasted me another year before refusing to connect using its USB interface without jumping through a strange series of steps I found on a user forum for a different model player from the same manufacturer. The prospect of spending more money on yet another unsatisfactory MP3 player didn't thrill me.

Fortunately, my library wasn't sitting idle during this time. They've recently made available a new service from Overdrive, the company which offers e-audiobooks for download. They offer an MP3 version of some of the e-audiobooks. Sadly this is a fledgling service at the moment so the selections aren't nearly as extensive as the WMA selections are yet but I'm hoping this will improve with time.

So far I've listened to Kipling's Captains Courageous and Stevenson's Kidnapped. Both were wonderful and made me choose longer paths when walking the dog so I could listen longer. If you've got activities which might benefit from distractions such as a good book being read by a skilled narrator, I recommend you check with your local library to see whether the offer e-audiobooks.

one blind mouse

My old bluetooth mouse, a Logitech which I really loved, recently developed a problem which caused it to skip erratically. Needless to say this served to annoy me greatly. I finally got fed up with the problem and being a bit reluctant to get another mouse which might fail prematurely, purchased a Microsoft Notebook Mouse 5000 (see image above) instead.

The new mouse is smaller than the Logitech which means it doesn't fit my hand quite as well as the Logitech did. On the plus side, at 1000 dpi the tracking is incredibly precise. That's a nice change from the way the old mouse had behaved recently. I'm pretty sure that's much better tracking resolution than the old mouse had when it was new.

One thing I don't care for is the scroll wheel which moves in a jerky fashion. I guess it's designed to keep you from scrolling too quickly and going past whatever you're trying to find. I prefer the smoother scroll wheels which Logitech mice typically have.

The manual estimates the battery life at 3 months on two AAA batteries. If it really lasts that long, that will be slightly better than the old mouse. I've got to get more rechargeable AAA batteries now.

All in all, I think I like this mouse. The fact that it was cheaper than replacing the old one with another Logitech would have cost me more is a nice bonus too.

Less than perfect

In case anyone thinks I'm one of the Apple fanboys oblivious to their shortcomings, I'll disclose my top pet peeve about Macs. Their default HFS file system is case insensitive. This can cause problems for software engineers like me as some engineers use the file extension .C for C++ source code (I prefer .cpp myself) and .c for C source code. It's not out of the question to want to have source files with identical base names and with file extensions which would be identical aside from their case within the same directory. In a development environment with both Linux and Mac systems available, this can cause Macs to fail to be able to check out source directories with these potentially duplicate filenames.

With the last few versions of OS X version 10.5, there has been an option to format disks with a case sensitive version of HFS. This should not be undertaken lightly. I've read accounts that this can cause problems for older programs (backup programs seem particularly vulnerable for some reason).

I've taken the approach that the devil you know is preferable to the devil you don't. I know how to avoid difficulties on a case sensitive file system. I'm not sure I can find workarounds for some of my older software were I to make the switch to case sensitive HFS.

Happy 40th birthday to my favorite OS

Unix celebrates its 40th anniversary this summer. This article from ComputerWorld recounts the history of the world's most productive OS.

Not a week goes by that I'm not somehow reminded of just how powerful Unix is. Treating all devices as files was brilliant. Being able to combine command line utilities via I/O redirection gives an amazing amount of power and flexibility to the Unix/Linux user interface.

It's no wonder the first thing I do whenever presented with a stock Windows PC is to download the Cygwin utilities. I still can't see how anyone can get any work done using only the built-in Windows commands.

XnView proves handy

One complaint my wife had was after the data restoration I spent much of the weekend on, all of her photos ended up with yesterday's date. This causes her problems locating photos because while she can typically remember the approximate date when she took a picture, she always can't recall for certain what she named the directory. Recently she's taken to my simple approach of prefacing the directory name with a date. I use a date of the form YYYYMMDD (year, month, day) which causes the directories to sort nicely.

I remembered JPG files contained metadata fields which stored useful information like landscape or portrait orientation (for cameras which have appropriate sensors), GPS data (for cameras with a GPS installed), photo settings, and the date the photo was taken. There's even a standard for how these metadata fields are recorded called EXIF.

A bit of searching turned up some software called XnView which allows one to perform a number of date related functions including the following:

- changing the create and/or modified file time stamps based on the date from the EXIF fields (very useful in this case)
- changing the EXIF time stamps based on the current file time stamp (useful when the camera's date was not set when the photo was taken)

As you might imagine, I was very happy to discover I didn't have to cobble together a solution on my own. While I enjoy writing the odd bash or Python script, doing so unnecessarily didn't strike me as much fun.