Category: Computers & Technology - Page 70

Seriously, UPS… you had to TRY to do that much damage, right?

The other day I ordered a RAM upgrade for my new MacBook. I had contemplated buying it at Best Buy, but I balked at their price of $199. I went down to the Apple Store (no Internet on the Macs on display at Best Buy, and apparently they have the store wrapped in RF shielding, as I wasn’t even able to get a signal on my iPhone there, either), not expecting them to sell RAM upgrades, but at least knowing I could spend a few seconds on a display MacBook checking RAM prices at Ramjet. $69. So I ordered it as soon as I got home.

The package arrived today. Or at least what was left of it. Fortunately the RAM appears to be intact, no thanks to the best efforts of UPS to destroy it. The question of whether such a tiny product really needed to be shipped in such a huge box is another matter, but at least the RAM was shrouded in bubble wrap.

Here’s what I found at the front door:

ups_ram_7

And here’s the prize inside:

ups_ram_9

More photos after the jump…

And now I’m going to shut down my computer and install this RAM!

And now for a completely different complaint about modern technology: out-of-sync HDTV audio

Cletus vs. Comcast Most of my complaints about the modern technologies I love so well pertain to computer software. But here’s a new one for you: out-of-sync audio on HDTV programming.

Last year, just in time for the Beijing Olympics, we purchased a 42-inch LCD TV. It’s awesome. I know they make ’em bigger, but our smallish living room really couldn’t handle anything bigger.

It’s all great, except for one thing: frequently (like around 30% of the time) while watching HDTV programming, the audio becomes severely out of sync — at least a second or two ahead of the video. We’re getting our HDTV programming via the cable company (Comcast). We just have basic cable, but Comcast delivers the high-def signals from our local broadcast stations.

Now I have come to a point where, when I express a complaint like this, I expect the first response from many people I know will be, “Why don’t you get digital cable, cheapskate?” Why don’t I, indeed. Start with the fact that I’m already giving Comcast more money every month than I can possibly justify; 95% of what’s on cable TV is utter garbage I would never deign to watch, even though I am paying for it. The only reason I’m even paying for basic cable is because when Comcast bought out Time Warner, they changed the pricing schedule such that it’s actually $3 cheaper per month to get basic cable TV and Internet bundled ($62) than to get Internet alone ($65).

So, I’m just fine with the only HD programming I’m receiving being the local channels. That’s all I really need or want anyway. But it would be nice to at least be able to watch those channels without this ridiculous audio lag appearing with increasing frequency.

Why blame Comcast? How do I know it’s not just the signal itself? Well, I don’t. But perusing Google for similar complaints, I found some suggestions that the more intermediary devices — including cable TV itself — between the digital broadcast signal and your HD television set, the more likely this audio sync problem was to occur. Essentially what it boils down to, as I understand it, is that the digital video signal takes varying amounts of time to process, but if there’s not proper equipment in place to apply an equivalent lag to the audio channel, keeping it in sync with the video, this problem will occur.

What’s the solution? Well, if the above is correct, I have a hunch that pulling out the good ol’ rabbit ears and attaching them to my 42-inch LCD might fix the problem. And it would certainly add to the aesthetics of my living room. But ultimately, Comcast needs to fix this problem. If they’re going to deliver the HD broadcast channels’ signals, they need to do it right. After all, that’s what we’re paying them for.

Disabling the pinch-zoom feature on the new MacBook

Update, May 24, 2010: Comments on this post keep trickling in, but Apple has long since fixed this issue. If you have a look at the screenshot of the Trackpad preference pane below, you’ll notice that, curiously, there are no checkboxes next to most of the “options.” This has been resolved with a software update. The current version of the preference pane looks like this. Note that now each of the items listed includes a checkbox to turn that feature on or off. Also note that in my settings, I have unchecked “Pinch Open & Close” and “Screen Zoom.” Problem solved.

If you don’t make a habit of running Software Update regularly, you really should. Click on System Preferences in your Dock, then click on Software Update. I recommend checking the boxes for automatic updates, and be sure to click Check Now and follow the on-screen instructions to grab any available updates you haven’t yet installed.

Don’t get too excited by the title of this post: I don’t have an answer. But it’s annoying the hell out of me in Safari and I want a resolution. I’m hoping that once again a post here might be a beacon in the darkness and someone will come along with an answer.

I’ve already looked here and on other similar forums, and all of the responses seem to be one of the following:

Download this shareware app you’ve never heard of and it will fix it.
In addition to being an idiot and a major d-bag, I’ve never touched one of the new MacBooks in my life, but I won’t let that stop me from cluelessly suggesting that you check under System Preferences > Trackpad in an obnoxiously smug way.
How on Earth can you possibly be accidentally zooming when you’re trying to scroll or whatever it is you’re trying to do instead of zooming? Clearly you are a moron who just can’t figure out how to use a trackpad properly.

Thanks, assholes. But seriously, thanks, assholes.

I know Apple has a history of introducing “innovative” features that their users may not be entirely willing to embrace. Some have been prescient (dumping the floppy disk drive) and others have been folly (the infamous “hockey puck” mouse). Obviously the company is trying to transform the way our fingers interact with electronic devices. The multi-touch trackpad is an impressive innovation and it’s also a logical extension of the touch control of the iPhone and the iPod touch. But it’s also radically different from a traditional trackpad in ways that are not at all apparent, upon initial introduction, to the user. I love some of these features, such as the two-finger scrolling and the four-finger swipe to switch apps.

Others, not so much, especially since there’s no forced education on how they work, so it’s easy to do them accidentally. Case in point, as I was just writing about the four-finger swipe, I decided to test it to make sure I was describing it accurately. Unfortunately I absent-mindedly swiped with only three fingers, an action which unbeknownst to me is the equivalent, in Safari anyway, of clicking the Back button. I never would have expected this, nor would I ever want it to do this.

I think the fundamental disconnect I’m struggling with here is that the interface metaphor is incomplete. With an iPhone, there is no cursor, and your fingers interact directly with what you’re looking at on the screen. With the MacBook, you still have a traditional, non-touch screen and a mouse- or trackpad-controlled cursor moving about on that screen. Putting iPhone-style touch gestures onto a non-screen trackpad, and mixing those gestures awkwardly with traditional mouse-style movement of an on-screen cursor just isn’t intuitive and it came with no advance warning.

So, boo on Apple for the half-baked multi-touch interface in general, but for the most part the only place where it’s really giving me trouble is in Safari. I almost never resize the text in Safari, but I scroll constantly in Safari. It makes sense to provide a convenient multi-touch gesture for scrolling, but how often does the average user resize the text on a web page? I suppose those whose sight is diminished may do it more than I do, but that still doesn’t justify making it such an easy-to-accidentally-trigger gesture, especially since there’s (apparently) no way to turn it off.

The problem is further exacerbated by the integration of the trackpad button into the trackpad itself. You always have at least two fingers on the trackpad — the one moving the cursor and the thumb resting at the bottom on the “button.” But where exactly is the boundary between the “button” and the rest of the trackpad? That seems to be the key flaw that is causing me to frequently resize my text in Safari accidentally.

That, ultimately, is what bothers me most about the new multi-touch gestures: most of them appear to be mandatory, like it or lump it. The new trackpad is obviously capable of performing all of the functions of a traditional, non-multi-touch trackpad. So how hard would it have been to provide the user with the option to turn off the new gestures if they don’t want to use them?

Come on, Apple. You’re better than that. Aren’t you?

A shout out to my international visitors, or at least their automaton surrogates

It’s been fun to study the data collected by Google Analytics about visitors to my site. It’s not terribly surprising when looking at the world map that the United States is dark green and all of the rest of the countries are either light gray (no visits) or very pale green (a few visits). Frankly, I’m quite surprised though that most of the countries are the pale green. Pretty much the only gray on the map is the majority of Africa (all but six countries), the cluster of former Soviet republics between Russia and Pakistan, Mongolia, a couple of smaller South American countries, and, vastly over-represented by Google’s use of Mercator projection, Greenland.

That’s pretty amazing. Nearly 2,500 (68%) of the slightly more than 3,700 visits my site received in the last month were from the United States, with the fairly obvious (for language reasons, if nothing else) U.K. and Canada following at 200 (5%) and 160 (4%) visits, respectively, and Australia in fifth place with 63 visits.

Among non-Anglophone nations, France was first, and fourth overall. Again, not terribly surprising. What is surprising is the sixth-place country: Poland, ahead of Germany by 10 visits. I’ve been to Poland. I enjoyed my visit; it’s a fine place; but I just didn’t expect much site traffic from there. Brazil, Italy and Spain round out the top ten countries with a combined total of 120 visits.

Looking at the top ten cities was even more surprising, to some extent. Well, OK, the top five cities were not surprising at all: Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, London and San Francisco. (I guess London was a little surprising, as the fourth most frequent source of visitors to my site. But, you know, it’s a big city.)

It was cities number eight and nine that really surprised me: La Victoria, Peru and Kissimmee, Florida. What? Well, OK. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kissimmee visits were entirely due to this, but I’m at a loss as to what it might be about my site that is so uniquely appealing to the residents of a district in Lima. If you live in Peru, please share!

No one city jumps out from Poland in the same way. My popularity there is far broader! But no more easily explained.

Sadly, though, all of this enthusiasm over my burgeoning international popularity fizzled when I took a close look at the stats for a particular country: China. I had a mere 7 visits from the world’s most populous nation. But given that country’s reported restrictions on access to the Internet, the low number is not so surprising. What is revealing, though, is the duration of the visits. All but one of them were for precisely the same amount of time: 0 seconds. One determined soul in Shanghai did actually spend 19 minutes on 3 of my pages, but the rest were blips too small to measure. Which suggests to me that either Chinese web surfers are experts at frightfully clicking instantly away from questionable online subject matter, or these visits were not from humans at all, but spider bots.

I suspect if I were to dig deeper into these international visits (as well as some in the U.S., particularly from San Francisco), I would find that many if not most of them are from search engine spiders simply undertaking the thankless task of indexing my site for the benefit of Internet users in their countries who are thoroughly indifferent to my unengaging drivel.

Why does Safari 4 Beta take SOOOOO LOOOONG to start up? Am I the only one having this problem?

I downloaded and began using the new Safari 4 Beta the day Apple released it. I’ve complained (mostly on Twitter) about various aspects of it, things that I’ve now (more or less) gotten used to: most significantly the still-awkward title bar tabs.

But one thing I haven’t gotten used to is the ridiculous amount of time Safari 4 Beta takes to get up and running, at least for me. The window appears promptly after clicking on the icon, but then I’m visited by the dreaded spinning beach ball of death. This situation endures for at least a minute or two (if anything, I am exaggerating that time down), and then things proceed as normal.

At first I thought maybe it was something peculiar about my own site (even though it loads just fine in other browsers, including Safari 3), which I have set to load as the home page. But I just waited out Safari’s ridiculous start-up time, then went into the preferences and set it to load with a blank page. And it still took just as long, not even loading anything from the Internet. So clearly it’s just something in the internal workings of the app itself.

I have not seen anything anywhere about this issue. Everyone seems to love Safari to death, and says nothing about its speed other than how blazing fast it is. I guess it’s pretty snappy once it gets going, but for me all I can think about is this ridiculous load time at the beginning.

And so, this humble blog post shall serve as a beacon in the darkness, calling out to all those who suffer as I do (oh, such suffering) from an inexcusable lag at the start-up of Safari 4 Beta.

For what it’s worth, I’m running a stock black MacBook purchased just last August (right before Apple retired them, of course), 2 GB of RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.6. In other words, this should not be happening.

Also, for what it’s worth, once Safari has gotten going, my site loads very fast… less than a second on my cable connection. So it’s definitely not something with my site (thankfully, since I can’t imagine what it would have been).