Greener Tech

>optical channelколи под наеммебелиally want to like MobileMe. The Apple revolution is supposed to be about slick, easy-to-use software that helps you spend less time troubleshooting and more time creating. MobileMe was to extend this concept to the not-so-new generation of web-based services. While it’s a nice facelift from their older .Mac service, it still has a long way to go.

Take their Gallery service. While it integrates easily with Apple’s iPhoto software, the web-based galleries are a mess. There’s too much interface and not enough… wait, what are we here for?

Pictures. Visitors to your gallery get fancy resize sliders, color pickers, and animated layouts to play with, which is great fun for the first few minutes. These fancy gadgets, however, soon get in the way of what we’re really trying to do - view pictures. When you click a thumbnail, it never just pops up. It always slides, zooms, or fades in. There’s no way to search within an album or sort pictures into a particular order.

But the most serious affront to my photographer sensibilities? The pictures don’t even display properly. Clicking a thumbnail should bring up a large version of the image. In MobileMe Gallery, it first brings up a fuzzy low-resolution version of the image at full size. A second or two later, the full-resolution version pops in. This is an odd behavior, and one I’ve never seen on any other website.

The net effect is that a visitor’s first impression of your pictures are that you’re a talentless hack that doesn’t know how to focus a camera. When you spend hours trying to get that perfect shot, you don’t want anyone’s first thought when viewing it to be, “Whoa, that’s blurry. Oh, there it goes. Yeah, that’s a pretty good shot.”

Next up to bat: Flickr.

I recently returned to Wesabe, a nifty money management site with a social community wrapped around it. Wesabe lets you visualize and track your spending across multiple accounts, and features discussion groups where users can talk about how to achieve goals (saving for a house, paying down debt).

When I joined Wesabe about 18 months ago, the defining feature seemed to be the “Tips” section. As you tagged your transactions into categories, the Tips page would show you tips written by members that were related to your transactions’ tags. So if you attached a “coffee” tag to a Starbucks transaction, for example, you’d get tips on how to save money at Starbucks, as well as some cheaper alternatives. If you’d found a printable coupon, you could post it for others to see. Great idea.

I stopped using Wesabe for a while, partly out of laziness, but mainly because of a lack of time and motivation to tag all of my transactions. I recently realized that I needed to get a handle on my spending, so I came back. I was pretty disappointed in what I found.

Some things have improved. Uploading bank data is now more streamlined, including an option to have Wesabe save your bank credentials and automatically update your accounts. This is much easier than running update software on your computer or manual uploads that were previously required (though still available if you’re concerned about security).

What really disappointed me was the changes in the Tips section. The tab now only shows results from their new “Value Engine,” which compares two merchants (one you frequent, one you don’t) based on other members’ spending habits and approval ratings. It’s a nice idea. Since I shop at Starbucks, it should show me a comparison with Dunkin Donuts. Users, on average, spend about a dollar less at Dunks and actually give them a higher approval rating.

But it doesn’t. It shows me a comparison between Starbucks and an independent cafe in another state. It also suggests I try Pizza Hut as an alternative to Subway. A useless comparison, but a forgivable mistake for a computer to make.

In introducing this new (and still a bit beta) feature, Wesabe has hidden their own killer app. If I want to see the user generated tips, I now have to click on Accounts -> Checking Account -> Merchant Name -> Tips for Merchant. That’s 4 clicks! And that just gives me tips on a specific merchant and its related tags. If I’m viewing Dunkin Donuts tips and I want to see auto tips, I have to back up or search for something new.

It’s just too much work. I want to see a page with the latest and highest rated tips for ALL my merchants and tags, all on one page. It should have the ability to sort by popularity or submission date, and a sidebar with a list of all of my tags and merchants so I can drill down from there. Let the hive mind work for me; I shouldn’t have to dig for this information. Put the Value Engine on another tab. Call it “Compare Merchants” or something like that. If it starts working, I’ll use it.

It seems like the number of user-contributed tips has waned since my first experience with Wesabe, and I wonder if that’s partly due to the lack of an easy way to get at the useful tips. The site also doesn’t coax me into contributing tips. If I saw a list of all of my merchants/tags and the number of tips for each, I might be inclined to write a few tips for the ones that don’t have any.

The idea that got me excited about Wesabe in the first place was that I could consolidate my financial data from multiple banks into one spot, see how I’m spending, and see user-generated tips - tailored to my spending habits - on how to save money and gain value from merchants. This last part, harnessing the collective knowledge of the users, is what sets Wesabe apart from Quicken, Mint, and all the others. That feature is now so crippled that it’s pretty much useless.

Problem: Some public WiFi activation pages can’t be completed on the iPhone or iPod Touch, preventing internet access.

Solution: Register the device’s MAC address with the system by spoofing it on a computer.

Notes: I occasionally find myself with some downtime on the campus of a large college for which my company does work. The activation page for their public WiFi network doesn’t render correctly in Mobile Safari, the web browser used in the iPhone and iPod Touch. The buttons you must press to page through the process are covered up by text, making them untouchable.

The workaround is to temporarily change a computer’s MAC address, the unique serial number of the computer’s WiFi card, to match that of the iPhone or iPod Touch. Completing the activation process on the computer then registers the mobile device’s MAC address with the activation system, allowing the device itself to bypass the activation process.

The workaround below will help get any device that doesn’t have a full web browser onto a public WiFi system with problematic activation pages. This process does require a computer with WiFi. The directions are based on ChangeMAC for Macs. Technitium is an equivalent for Windows computers, though I have not tested it.

1. Download ChangeMAC on your laptop.
2. Turn off WiFi on both your laptop and mobile device.
3. Find your mobile device’s MAC address. On the iPhone or iPod Touch, go to Settings > General > About. The MAC address is in the “WiFi Address” field.
4. On your laptop, load up ChangeMAC.
5. On the “Airport (wireless)” tab, enter the MAC address from your mobile device into the “New MAC Address” field and click “Set New Address.”         
6. Turn your laptop’s WiFi on, connect to the WiFi network, and complete the activation process.
7. Turn your laptop’s WiFi off.
8. Turn your mobile device’s WiFi on and connect to the WiFi network. It should now be able to access the internet without activation.
9. Change your laptop’s MAC address back to the original. This is shown as “Hardware MAC Address” in ChangeMAC. You must complete this step before trying to rejoin the WiFi network on the laptop; otherwise it will conflict with the mobile device’s identical MAC address.

Problem: When ripping video from DVD and re-authoring it, the Line21 Closed Captioning (CC2) data is lost.

Solution: Demux to “Headed M2V.”

Notes: With a same-day shipment deadline looming on the clock, I had to remove hissy noise from a DVD and re-burn it before duplicating and sending it out the door. I used MPEG Streamclip to “Demux to M2V and AIFF,” cleaned up the audio in Soundtrack Pro (very handy), and used Toast 8 to re-burn the DVD. The Closed Captioning, however, was gone. After some frantic Googling and guesswork, we tried re-ripping the video using the “Demux to Headed M2V” option as this seems to include more of the original header data from the source. I also noticed that when re-burning in Toast, it merely re-multiplexed the tracks before burning (rather than re-encoding as it had the first time, which I had chalked up to it doing more muxing). This time, the captioning was present.

Problem: Quicktime Broadcaster gets stuck on “Prerolling” and never starts Broadcasting.

Solution:

Add “:554″ to the end of the “Host Name” field.

Notes:

This was a puzzler. I tested on multiple machines under multiple conditions and got mixed results before I found the fix.

- MacBook behind firewall - failed
- MacBook direct to router - failed
- Mac Mini G4 1.4Ghz behind firewall & DMZ’d - failed
- Mac Pro behind firewall - successful
- eMac behind firewall - successful, but too slow
- PowerBook G4 1.4 Ghz behind firewall - successful

I took the PowerBook G4 to the broadcast site (behind uncontrolled firewall) and started the broadcast successfully. I stopped the broadcast to change audio settings, and then got the “Prerolling” issue again. Tried all combinations of settings and still no luck.

Finally called Akamai (our CDN provider), and they suggested adding “:554″ to the end of our entry point IP address, so the host name looks like:

72.246.3.2:554

Worked fine. Went back and tried it on two MacBooks behind firewalls, also worked. Strange, since the default port is 554 if you check “Broadcast over TCP” (which I had), but I guess this forces past a QuickTime bug related to firewalls.

Problem: User has a Treo 700p and needs a local copy of the Global Address List (”Public Contacts” in Kerio) on his MacBook to sync with.

Fix:

Unfortunately requires Windows with Outlook and Thunderbird. Haven’t tried it with Entourage.

1. Install Kerio Outlook Connector and open Outlook.
2. Export a CSV (Windows).
3. Import the CSV into Mozilla Thunderbird.
4. Export as LDIF.
5. Import LDIF into Apple Address Book.
6. HotSync the Treo.

Notes:

I took the basic idea from Paul Thurrott after having similar CSV import problems. I also tried Thunderbird for Mac, but the field mappings were off and about half were missing. Also tried CSV2LDIF, but that’s only useful if you speak LDIF-ese.

I also tried VersaMail’s sync feature to directly sync with Kerio Mailserver. The rub there is that even though Kerio claims you can view the Global Address List (GAL) from VersaMail, it’s only email address lookup. No numbers. On a smartphone. Useless.

VersaMail will sync the phone’s contacts with your personal contacts on the server, but there’s no way to sync the public contacts (or calendar) with your phone. Furthermore, the “mini” version of Kerio Webmail that shows up when you try to log in via Treo is also email only; no contacts or calendar.