This user’s experienceby Matt Henderson, since 2003

For a number of years, I used a 15″ Titanium Powerbook as my sole computer. The idea (at the time I bought it) was that a laptop would provide the best of both worlds: I could connect external equipment like mice, keyboards and monitors when working at the desk, while retaining the flexibility to take it with me when on the go, or when the urge hit to work on the couch.

After a few years, it hit me one day that this all wasn’t quite the utopia I’d hoped for. I’d ended up with so much stuff connected to the laptop (the above mentioned keyboard, mouse and monitor, plus a variety of USB and firewire devices) that I’d often not take the laptop with me simply due to the pain of having to disconnect everything. And when I did occasionally use the TiBook as a portable, I found it a bit too big to comfortably carry around and use. So, one day I realized I had a portable acting as an overpriced and underpowered desktop.

I decided to make a change this year, and purchased a dual-G5 desktop machine, to be complemented by a 12″ Aluminum Powerbook G4 (1GHz, SuperDrive). I think I’ve already written about the G5, so I’ll take some time now to write about the Powerbook.

In short, this (second revision) 12″ Powerbook is as close as I’ve yet come to the perfect machine. It’s not without a couple of shortcomings (which I’ll get to in a bit), but I simply love it. The size is ideal — it reminds me of the blissful days of the Powerbook Duo. I find myself carrying it everywhere. It fits nicely in my sling sack, which I usually take to the cafe. It fits comfortably in my lap, when working on the couch. And it’s the perfect companion to take to our Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes, for watching instructional DVDs.

From a performance standpoint, it’s about what any Powerbook owner would expect, given a 1GHz G4 processor. For the past few years, I’ve found that, except in the area of media processing (like making iMovies), the level of computing power in most Macintosh computers is quite comfortable for me. One important note, however, is that until I upgraded the Powerbook with an addition 512MB of memory, the stock 256 MB will result in quite some virtual memory disk swapping (if you, like me, like to keep a number of applications always open.)

Perhaps one of the best aspects of the new Powerbook is the keyboard, which is big and clearly the best keyboard I’ve ever used on a notebook. I find it almost comfortable enough to use full-time.

I also bought an Airport Extreme card and Base Station, which has represented quite an upgrade to the original Airport card I had in the TiBook. The additional bandwidth is quite comfortable when transferring files or watching QuickTime videos over the wireless network. The Powerbook’s Airport reception appears closer to that of my friend’s iBook (good!) than my old TiBook (very bad!)

One inital disappointment was the display. Apple has used a lower quality display than that in the 15″ and 17″ models (including my old TiBook). My first impression of the display was that it looked horrible. However, a post to the Apple Discussion lists revealed that much can be done to improve the situation. Turns out that most of the problem is the standard calibration, as delivered by Apple. There is a shareware product called SuperCal that is capable of creating a display calibration profile that dramatically (and I mean Dramatically!) improves the display. In fact, if Apple had delivered a similar profile, I probably would have never noticed the deficiency in the basic display quality with respect to the TiBook. So, on this point, I’m a happy camper now.

The only other problem I’ve encountered is the latch. Sometimes the magnet-based latch will just not engage. This worried me a bit (in that I’d hate to have to return the thing for repair) but another tip from the Apple Discussion list suggested that just lightly tapping the top of the screen with your finger will engage the lap. This works like a charm, so now I wouldn’t consider returning the device over this issue.

Apart from those two issues, I have been very, very happy with this Powerbook. It’s my friend. We go everywhere together. I even find myself working full-time on it from the terrace a few days each week. (Although the keyboard’s great, I did spring for an ingenious, small, 30 Euro wireless mouse from Laptec. Very high quality, and with an 800 dpi optical sensor, it’s nearly like using a wired mouse.)

That’s all for now. Merry Christmas everybody.

I was recently asked by someone on a mailing list to document some usage tips related to the DEVONthink information manager. I’ve been looking for time to write a complete article, and haven’t found any, so what I’ve decided to do is to publish bit by bit, starting with this post.

The Problem
My company, MakaluMedia GmbH, is a software engineering and services company, and at any point in time we’ve got several commercial and internal projects active. During the course of any given day, I will receive a multitude of emails, meetings and phone calls (some of which are important and some of which are not).

The Solution
To help manage this information, I have created the following structure in DEVONthink:

DailyNotes/
MakaluMedia/
  Projects/
    Project A/
      History/
    Project B/
      History/

Of particular importance are the root-level DailyNotes/ folder and the project-level History/ folder.

At all times, I keep a separate window of the DailyNotes/ open, and set to the "Outline" view. This splits the window into two vertically stacked sections: 1) the top section listing the contents of the folder (DailyNotes), and 2) the bottom section listing the contents of any selected item in the above list.

Whenever anything noteworthy happens during the day, I create a new text or RTF document in DailyNotes, and give the document a name that completely describes the event. I also use a Spell Catcher shortcut to enter the date and time in the file title, in the format YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM:

DailyNotes/
  2003-11-06-15-07 MLK Requested New FTP Account to be Established

Sometimes the document title alone serves as a sufficient representation of the event. In case more information is needed, I record that information in the document content. In the above example, I could copy/paste the contents of the requesting email.

Replicates
Once this is done, I use DEVON's "replicate" function to create a replicate of the entry. A replicate is like a duplicate, except that the replicate is the same as the original -- so if you edit the original, the replicate is also changed.

Once the replicate is created, I control-click on it, and move it in the menu hierarchy to the MLK project's History folder:

Projects/
  MLK/
    History/
      2003-11-06-15-07 MLK Requested New FTP Account to be Established

In this way, my DailyNotes folder has a running history of everything that happens, while my Project History folders have a running history of the project-related happenings.

Record Everything
I use the DailyNotes area for everything, not just project-related information. I also record software purchases there, modifications to my computer, etc.

DailyNotes/
  2003-11-07-09-36 Installed Apple Security Update on TiBook
  2003-11-06-15-13 Purchased Freeway Pro for the Mac
  2003-11-06-15-07 MLK Requested New FTP Account to be Established

Actions/ToDos
Taking this all one step further, if an event requires that I take some action, then I will embed the word ACTION in the document title:

DailyNotes/
  2003-11-07-09-36 ARTS Request to Clarify Specifications [ACTION]

At the end of the day, or whenever convenient, I will scan the recorded events in DailyNotes, and will create ToDos in (one of) my other critical productivity applications, Life Balance.

Clean-Up
I normally keep about a month's worth of entries in DailyNotes/. At the end of the month, I'll create a new folder within DailyNotes/, e.g. "2003-06", and drag all of that month's entries into that folder, thereby shortening the DailyNotes visible list, while retaining the entries.

Conclusion
I've found that consistently documenting events in this manner helps in many ways. I quickly review the past week, getting an idea of how "under-control" things are. If a particular project has a lot of entries, and needs some intervention, it becomes apparent. When a customer calls, I'll switch to the history of their project, and immediately have a complete project overview at my fingertips, with all details available. The information is all available for easy drag-and-drop into an email (using Mailsmith, of course. :-) or other programs.

And having all this data available to DEVONthink's amazing internal search engine is icing on the cake.

Ok, that's all for now. More tips on the way in future posts. Hope this was helpful.

Based on my own experience, and some reports from others, I thought that Palm software didn’t run on the G5. A tip from MacOSXHints.com suggested the following:

• Make sure you’re running Palm Desktop 4.1 (I was running 4.0)
• Login as the root user (you must enable this user in the NetInfo utility), and perform the Palm installation as root.

After doing this, I’ve now got Palm synchronisation back up and running on my G5. Continue reading →

From Niall:

http://www.apple.com/uk/macosx/panther – in particular note the reference to acronyms at the bottom right hand corner – not to be seen at http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther – British Unix hacker humour.

From my French friend Michel — iTrike.

I purchased and installed StuffIt Deluxe 8 for my Mac. Having used it for a couple of weeks now, I’ve had the following thoughts:

1. In contrast to many others, I do like the new icons.

2. The “Stuff by Rename” feature is very nice, and something I missed from the old Classic version. It allows you to archive files and folders just by adding the appropriate extension to their name in the Finder, e.g. .sit, .sitx, .tar, .tgz.

Many people have expressed concern over the fact that Aladdin used a KEXT (Kernel Extension) to achieve this functionality, comparing it to “killing a fly with a bazooka.” So what’s the problem? Well, if Aladdin introduced any bugs in the KEXT, it could cause a kernel panic on your system, as opposed to just killing the Finder or some other app, the way more cleanly designed implementations would.

That said, I’ve personally experience no stability problems since introducing StuffIt 8, and I’ve not heard of anyone else with problems either.

1. The old stuffit format, .sit, does not preserve Unix permissions. That means that if you stuff an application in OS X (which is really a folder), then it won’t launch when unstuffed, because the Unix execution bits are not set. The solution is to use the new stuffit format, .sitx.

I wish Aladdin, in StuffIt 8, made that more apparent to the users (like with a big splashing warning!)

1. StuffIt Deluxe 8 introduces a new Backup tool that has the potential to be quite nice, but unfortunately isn’t. The tool allows you to specify a periodic stuffed backup of your files, and to date-stamp the name of the backup. Very nice! It even uses the Unix cron utility to schedule the backup, instead of reinventing the wheel with its own scheduler.

So what’s the problem? You can only backup your home directory, or one of the pre-selected folders that StuffIt 8 allows you to select! — i.e. you can not choose any arbitrary folder for backup. Good grief, what were they thinking!

Thanks to my French friend Michel for pointing out this fascinating project of transmitting TCP over — bongo drums. :-)

Thanks to Mike for pointing out Hand/RSS, what appears to be the first RSS reader for the Palm. Yippee!

If you’re a Palm developer, and looking for an idea — how about a good RSS news aggregator? Something like NetNewsWire on the Mac? Web surfing on the Palm is the pits, unless you happen to be into two dimensional scrolling. Syncing Web content for offline reading on the Palm is also the pits. But reading news from RSS feeds, which is mainly text, should be a quite an enjoyable experience on the Palm. And RSS publication is growing rapidly — just heard recently you can turn your custom Amazon.com searches into RSS streams, to keep up with new releases based on your own defined criteria.

While waiting for DirectNIC to respond to my support request email and fax (I’m sure they’ll be getting back in touch with me any minute now…), I started looking over that transfer confirmation email they sent me. I noticed a slight difference between the single (well hidden) “ok, confirm the transfer (you schmuck)” link, and the 50 or so odd “DENY THE TRANSFER (We knew you were bright. You’re better off staying with us anyway!)” links. And that one difference was the presence of the following in the URL:

&mode=nack

Being a computer nerd, I immediately suspected that “nack” means “no acknowledgement” — which, by adding this, would probably tell the system to skip the login requirement, and move right on to servicing of the request. They add that to all the “Deny the transfer” links, so you can deny the transfer with as little hassle as possible.

So, I added the “nack” bit to the “confirm” URL and gave it a whirl. The system responded with:

Command completed successfully 

Yahoo! No login, and it looks my transfer is going to go through. I’ll know in the next few hours. :-)

Nice thing about a weblog is that it provides a place to vent…

Recently I agreed to purchase a domain name from a user of the DirectNIC domain registrar. Fortunately for me, I managed to negotiate that the domain would not be paid for until it had been successfully transferred to my registrar, OpenSRS. (My company, MakaluMedia, is an affiliate domain provider with OpenSRS.)

The original owner of the domain (we’ll call him Mr. Biz), once the sales agreement had been negotiated, logged into his account at DirectNIC, and modified the admin record of the domain to reflect my information. The act of doing that makes me the new owner. (Domains, by the way, are not really owned, but rather something more like assigned.)

At this point, I, as the new domain owner (the one whose name appears on the domain’s Admin record) would have the right to initiate a transfer of the domain from one registrar to another. However, since Mr. Biz himself had only owned the domain for a short period before selling it to me, the general rules required that I wait six-weeks before initiating the transfer to OpenSRS.

So I waited.

After the six weeks passed, I logged into my account at OpenSRS, and initiated a transfer. As expected, I received shortly afterwards an email from DirectNIC, indicating that someone at OpenSRS wanted to transfer the domain, and presenting a link which I could click to confirm the request. It was interesting to note that the email was absolutely packed with links I could click — in one simple step — to reject the request. In fact, I had to carefully point the mouse to avoid clicking one of these links!

Selecting the confirmation link led me to the DirectNIC website, where I expected an acknowledgment of my cancellation. Instead, I was taken to a login page. Turns out, I’ve got to login to a DirectNIC account to confirm the transfer request. While I’m the owner of the domain, the domain itself is still managed within the DirectNIC account of Mr. Biz — an account to which I obviously have no access.

So, I’m presently trying to resolve this deadlock by asking Mr. Biz to access the transfer confirmation link (before it expires!), login to his account, and confirm the transfer. So far I’ve not heard back from him. :-( — which is why it’s fortunate that I didn’t agree to pay for the domain before it had been transferred to my registrar.

But this whole episode really irks me, because its absurd to assume that everyone authorised to confirm a transfer request at DirectNIC happens to be the owner of the account under which it is managed. By doing so, DirectNIC very much hampers the process of domain transfer — which of course is fine by them.

And here’s what really gets me. The FAQ on the DirectNIC site suggests that to conduct a domain transfer, the original owner transfers the domain to another account within DirectNIC, the owner of which — after making a $15 internal account transfer fee! — can then transfer the domain to another registrar!

If there’s one thing I really enjoy using the Palm for, it’s reading ebooks. Things have improved so much since I first gave ebooks a try several years ago:

• First, there’s a lot more big-name titles available, from places like PalmDigitalMedia.

• Now that Palm devices have backlit screens, it’s possible to read in low-light conditions, such as the bedroom or the balcony in the late evenings.

• There are some nice fonts available for download or purchase, that greatly improve the legibility of the text on screen.

• Since Palms have more memory, and can expand, one can conveniently tote around an entire library. (My 256K SD card, at about 400k per book, could conceivably hold over 600 ebooks.)

I’ve just finished reading (what else?) Lance Armstrong’s, “It’s not about the bike” (very good book) and am about to begin reading “A Walk in the Woods” by Bill Bryson, about one man’s hike through the Appalachian Trail. Before that, it was Robert Ludlum’s “The Janson Directive”.

Alex Harper, the author of the nice MenuMeters utility for MacOS X recently helped me solve a nagging problem: Sometimes newly installed PrefsPanes simply wouldn’t show up in the System Preferences. Turns out there’s a preference panes cache file that can become corrupt:

~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.cache

Deleting this file solves the problem.

Thanks, Alex!

So why would I want to go through all this when I’m less than 5 meters from my net-connected computer with a full-sized keyboard? Good question. :-)

My thumbs are cramping — my neck is straining — my wife is giving me that look — but I’m WIRELESSLY BLOGGING FROM THE LIVING ROOM BABY!, with my new Palm Tungsten C. More on this and other T|C experiences coming soon…