A New Cat in the House

The latest Apple OS X operating system is mainly an under the hood release focussing on stability, speed, and a smaller footprint. It completes the transition to a 64 bit system and adds more polish and refinement to the famous OS X GUI.

An hour after it arrived, I started the installation. Just past 45 minutes later, the new cat was purring on my iMac. True to the advance announcements, the system runs faster than previous versions. The installer runs on its own and installs over the old system, removing the old pieces and freeing up gigabytes of disk drive space.

The minor bumps I had were all tidied up by the next day. I had left my Time Capsule on during the install and the system lost track of it. When I noticed the lack of backups in spite of Time Machine starting up each hour, I opened the Time Machine preferences, repointed the program to Time Capsule, and logged it into the network again.

My Dashboard started acting strange and freezing at various stages. Puzzled, I slept on the problem and then tracked down the Dashboard plist file (preferences list , an XML file). I moved the file to the desktop and restarted my iMac to force the system to create a new plist. Yes! The Dashboard was back. A bit later, I was looking at the widget for backups when Time Machine started and Dashboard froze once again. Rats!

I pulled the plist file and rebooted once the backup finished. Yep, working again. This time, I opened the “Manage Widgets” panel and sure enough two widgets had a red circle bar symbol next to them. One was the Time Machine Buddy. Deleted the two and the Dashboard widgets are working fine once again.

I am waiting an upgrade from Reunion next week for my genealogy program, and a third party browser plug-in to let Quicktime play the Windows Media Player formats used by CBC. The plug-in I have won’t work with the new zippy 64 bit Safari browser. However; CBC conveniently released a free app for the iPhone, so I am using my iPod Touch as a radio while I work :-)

It is a real bonus to have an operating system that continues to improve and run faster on existing hardware - a far cry from my experience with Windows which slowed down with each new release (in some cases a release refused to install for me (98 to ME) unless I reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled everything, program by program - No thanks.)

As I pass my second anniversary of switching to a Mac, I am a very satisfied customer of Apple. Customer focus, attention to detail, and the integration of hardware and software make a huge improvement over the Windows world.

Modern Sales and Logistics

On Monday Apple announced that OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" would be released four days later on Friday August 28th, 2009.

I decided to order online and at the same time get an AC charger for my iPod. Tuesday evening, I checked my order status. The charger was ready to ship via FedEx. Wednesday the 26^th I checked again and saw it had been picked up at the factory in Shenzhen, China that morning. It was clocked in a bit later in the day at Lantau Island, Hong Kong, and then arrived that afternoon in Anchorage Alaska. From there it went down to the FedEx complex in Indianapolis, Indiana. From there it came back up to Mississauga on the following morning, the 27th. And before noon it arrived at my door.

Meantime, the Snow Leopard DVD left for my house on the 27^th via Purolator and next morning, the 28^th, The Purolator site had tracking records up telling me it was in Toronto and been loaded on a truck just after 8 am for delivery today. Shortly before 5 pm the DVD arrived at my door. We had a new cat in the house.

Philco 90A Radio c1929

I liked fixing radios when I was a kid. In 1952 our neighbour offered me an old radio and after school I took my wagon across the street and up the hill to her house to collect my gem. It came in a wooden box with a speaker mounted on the top. The radio was a c1929 Philco model 90A - the early version with a number 80 rectifier tube and a pair of number 45 tubes for class B push-pull audio power amplifiers. The old set worked great pulling in a raft of AM stations from Canada and the States.

A few years later I cannibalized it for part. The only piece remaining today is the little plate from the rear of the chassis showing it was a Model 90a made by Philco Products Ltd., Toronto Canada with a 90 watt power supply designed for 25-40 cycles, 115 volts AC. In those days Toronto was on 25 cycle power meaning special transformers and motors not required in other parts of the province which were powered by 60 cycle AC. Fortunately the 25 cycle transformers were fine on 60 cycle - just a bit over built.

Tonight I did a quick search and found a site with some radio schematics - including the Philco 90/90A. If you tinker with the old radios, drop by the site: The Old Radio fixer-upper Guy

Man of many talents

Last week Ed Warner dropped by to collect some old tools and iron artifacts my dad had collected over the years. Like my dad, Ed is a member of the Tool Group (and currently the editor of its newsletter). As we finished loading his van, I showed him an old Atwater Kent model L horn speaker. The instrument was in two parts due to the failure of a white metal casting some years ago through carelessness on my part. In a matter of minutes Ed had analyzed the break and figured out how to make a repair using a small piece of pipe flanged and threaded to size on his lathe.

Two days later, Ed phoned and asked me to listen to a sound - it was my repaired c1924 horn speaker connected to a modern 20 watt amplifier. Ed returned the horn to me yesterday, no sign at all that it had been repaired. It came with a warning that the horn would be damaged more if it suffered another mishap as the metal cover holding the flange of the new connecting pipe to the base of the horn would be torn open.

Others have mentioned Ed’s skill at repairing small mechanical devices creating any missing metal parts as needed. And we have all seen his skills put to use to restore old wooden view cameras, bellows and all. A true craftsman in this age of automation and throwaway. Thanks, Ed.

Distant Suns

In the 1980s a program came out for my beloved Amiga that was a serious package for amateur astronomers. Mike Smithwick’s Distant Suns offered an interactive galaxy and close-ups of interesting objects. Before the Amiga stumbled into oblivion, the program was ported to Windows where incantation 6.0 lives today.

More recently, last fall Distant Suns was ported to Apple’s fabulously successful iPhone/iPod Touch duo. If you own one of these little pocket marvels, a copy will cost you just under $4 US at the Apps Store. If you use Windows 95 through XP (or run the various emulations that bring the charms of Windows to the Mac) you can buy a desktop version on-line from the author. Check out www.distantsuns.com (or the App Store) for more information.

NB. Pardon my tone on Windows, my daughter was over yesterday with her Vista laptop which has been struggling since the Microsoft patch fiasco on June 6th. She was trying to write a paper. Since the “security auto update” mentioned, many keystrokes in Word, including a space, have a slight delay that throws off even a mediocre typist like me. I had to keep her away from (glass) windows for the well-being of her laptop and the safety of beings outdoors.

Solving Video Babble

Video comes in many variations and versions on a multitude of media. The other day, I received a DVD video of 1920s home movies to review. The disk opened with Front Row on my Mac. Its menu gave a choice of an introduction and four short movies. I copied it to my Mac so others could see the DVD while I had a copy to review. Unfortunately, the copy was stuck on the introduction. The menu keys for Front Row now changed the system audio volume instead of the menu choices.

I tried iTunes. No luck. QuickTime. No luck. A google search suggested creating a dmg file (disk image). No luck. Another search suggested using DropDMG to make a DVD image. No luck. Yet another google search suggested a free cross platform media player. Success.

VLC Media Player ( www.videolan.org), approaching its version 1.0 is part of the VideoLAN software project which produces free and open software for use in multimedia under the GNU (General Public License). It handles a wealth of formats and is offered in compiled versions (binaries) for numerous operating systems, including Windows, Mac, and a dozen versions of Linux. If you need a player for video, check it out.

Kodachrome 1935 - 2009

Sad to learn Kodachrome, the storied colour slide film, will disappear this year. It was born two years before me and would have made it possible for my dad to snap me in colour, but his camera was a trusty Kodak Junior Six-20 which he loaded with Verichrome B&W film. In the 1950s, when I finally bought my first 35mm camera, we had a choice of the expensive and slow Kodachrome colour slide film and the faster process-it-yourself Anscochrome slide film based on the Agfa patents. I soon learned to favour the Kodachrome for colour. Most of my Anscochrome slides from the late 50s are now faded magenta while most of the Kodachromes are still usable. Slow speed and high contrast were a nuisance. I think by the time I bought Kodachrome, it was rated asa 10 and prone to blown highlights or dense shadows unless the lighting was relatively flat.

The Kodachromes are marvels of colour accuracy and fine detail. I shot this old Buick wheel 40 years ago this September at a museum near Plattsburg NY. Even today the colour and detail are there. In our leap to embrace digital we have left behind a revolutionary invention that brought quality colour initially to 16mm home movies and a year later to the 35 mm “minicams” that were capturing consumer attention world-wide.