My ipod ate my podcast

Anyone who tells you that user support forums are useless is wrong. Here's what happened to me. I bought a new computer in July. This means I had to reload all my music on a new version of itunes. Fortunately everything was on a cd. No problem. Well, except for some doubles. But since then I haven't been able to put podcasts on my ipod. Why? I didn't know. I could download them to itunes, but they wouldn't sync.

This could be an issue. As a regular reader of the Apple support forums, I have seen that there are a lot of problems associated with this program. So Steve Jobs hates Flash, calls it "buggy", but there is no buggier program than itunes. I always refuse updates because of the horror stories of people losing their entire libraries, & recently computer crashes.

So I read up on podcasts. Problems with timestamps & not downloading back episodes. But until yesterday I hadn't seen anything on my problem. I had given up & was watching TWIT on the actual website. But I would rather download audio, put it on my ipod, then attached my ipod to my speakers in my living room & listen to it while being able to move around the house. So finally I see a post in which someone says hook up your ipod, click on it in itunes, click on podcasts, & see if its checked to sync. Guess what? It wasn't! So I did, & now it works. Apparently the updated itunes doesn't sync podcasts by default. The older version did, unless I forgot that I did it manually. So check everything when something doesn't work, or read the support forums. They actually helped me.

Technology in ancient Egypt

Today I visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose. It is the largest collection of artifacts in the Western United States. Why here? Can't answer that one, except to say that the Rosicrucian order was first in New York, then SF, Tampa, then came to San Jose in 1927. I am not going to discuss the facts as to how old the order actually is. Just that the founder of AMORC came here & built a museum at the order's headquarters.

The museum is built in Ancient Egyptian style, & includes several actual mummies, including one of a 4-6 year old girl. The display for this mummy includes information on an investigation at Stanford, where the mummy was put under CT Scans & other methods involving Silicon Graphics & NASA.

There is a complete recreation of a rock cut tomb, which you can walk through. It is quite extensive, with several rooms, including wall paintings. There are several actual & replica  coffins. A lot of small artifacts from daily life. Plus a large gallery devoted to Mesopotamia (current Iraq).

Yes this culture was from 4000 years ago to about 1000 years ago. But the technology they used has stood the test of time. One wonders if things we are manufacturing today will exist even a hundred years from now. When you think of that culture, & how it seems that world culture went backwards after their society collapsed, it is astonishing. There were actually several periods, because of times when Pharoahs were replaced with local leaders. These periods are called intermediate periods, & they happened twice. Between the old Kingdom & the Middle Kingdom. It is in the 4th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (2750 BC-2160 BC) when the great pyramids were built.

I know. I'm not talking about cell phones or computers. but this is still technology. Very ancient, but what they did for Science & Engineering is fascinating, & the reason why you see a lot of tv specials on this era.

Who called my secret number?

It's always a mystery when someone calls that you don't know. It's even stranger when they call a number you've never given out. First things first. My home phone is set up with an answering machine. This way I can monitor my calls. I listen to the person leaving the message before answering. Nine out of ten times it's a telemarketer. Sorry, not answering. They don't understand the words "sorry, I'm not interested". But I also get a lot of what I call "ghost calls". The phone rings, the answering machine picks up, & either they hang up as soon as my message comes on, or they wait until the beep, & then they hang up. And sometimes it shuts off without hanging up. Very odd. but that's technology.

Then today, I decided to check my cell phone to see if I needed to charge it. See, I have a prepaid phone. This means I don't have a monthly fee to Verizon or AT&T. I can't afford to pay $60 a month plus data fees when I barely use the phone. So instead I have this cheap cell that I put a $30 card on every 3 months. Nobody, & I mean nobody knows this number. I have never given it out to anybody. Not friends, not relatives, not my employer.

So I go to check my phone this morning to find that someone tried to call me at 8:30 while I was taking a shower. Who? It was my area code, but I didn't recognize the number, & like I said no one has my number. Then I looked, & it said I missed a call on July 1. Uh, again-who?

Technology is great, but that doesn't mean I want mystery people calling a number I haven't given out. heck, I don't want them calling my home phone. So while cell phones can be good for someone on the go, or just for emergencies, I wonder if businesses are now making robot calls to cell phones. Since you get charged for answering calls, I consider this to be beyond the pale. This is the cell phone equivalent of spam. Do we now need spam filters on our phones?

The new iTV-Whats it mean to you?

An article in the San Jose Mercurynews today was all about Wednesday's big Apple event. Yes, it will probably be about new ipods. But there is speculation about a new version of the Apple TV. I don't have one & don't want one. I don't own a mac anyway. But the article did point out one of the problems with entertainment right now. Too many platforms.

What does that mean? It means you have a tv. You have a cable or satellite box. You have a dvd player. Maybe a vcr. Tivo? Roku? A stereo. A game system (xbox, playstation,wii, maybe all 3). Where do you put all this stuff. How many cables hooked up to how many wall plugs or surge protectors. How many remote controls. It's ridiculous.

So a single system would be better. I would like to be able to watch internet based programming on my tv, but it isn't happening any time soon? Why? Because Comcast, Time Warner, Directv & all the others don't want to lose customers. The reason I would like it is because there is stuff online you can't get on your tv. ESPN has on their website stuff like Rugby , Aussie Rules & even European soccer matches not seen here. They have an international channel we don't have access to, but some of that stuff ends up on ESPN 3. In the fall, every college football game carried by the various ESPN channels shows up on ESPN 3, including ones not shown in your area. But no way to put that on your tv.

Apple might want a subscription model like itunes. You know, pay for what you want to see, sort of like on demand. I guarantee you the cable companies don't want that. Notice how hard they fight against ala carte? Think of it, one box, one remote to do what you do now with 5 or 6 remotes.

Yes there is a group of young people who don't have tv's & watch on line. But the choices are limited. Try watching a cable show online. TNT lets you see the first ten minutes. Whoopee. Cable companies routinely get shows removed from sites like Hulu through contract disputes. It 's not a good system. David Letterman's show has been missing from CBS's website for two weeks, & now only 2 episodes are there. So something needs to change. According to a NY Times/CBS News poll 88% of respondents subscribe to cable or satellite, only 15% would consider using something like Hulu. People are creatures of habit. Things will not change overnight.

Spreadsheet woes.

I wanted to use a spreadsheet to balance my checkbook. Sounds simple, right? Guess again. It doesn't matter which one you use because all spreadsheets are based on Excel anyway. Open Office Calc saves in Excel 97-2003 format. I've never used Gnumeric, but I'm sure it probably does the same thing.

Here's what happened to me. And BTW, it's happened on both Excel & Calc. You type in the amount of a check you wrote, & the freaking spreadsheet rounds off to the next dollar. Why? It's my spreadsheet, I wrote the check. I think I know what I paid. Why is this even an issue? How am I supposed to balance my checkbook this way if the spreadsheet is going to screw up the check amounts.

Computer programs are great when the do what you them to. The problem is programmers who write code that does it's own thing. Same with Word. I can write the name of a website or even a person, & have the word processor decide, sorry, that's an incorrect spelling. Maybe it is, but maybe the company or person has a different spelling. You know how many different ways there are to spell my last name? Probably between 5 & 10. Maybe more.

It just seems that the computer should make life easier, not a royal pain in the u-no-where.

Firefox add-ons: The good, the bad & the useless.

One of the reasons Firefox is the 2nd most popular browser in the world is the extensions you can add. Every one wants to be an individual, & with Firefox you can. Every person who uses it has a different version, based on what extensions you have. Some people have 50 different add-ons, some 25. I have 4. My 80+ year old neighbor probably doesn't know what an add-on is, but he does run Firefox.

Over the years, I have experimented with probably 20 different add-ons. My personal take is that maybe half of the ones on the official site work. My big two are the same as everyone else. No Script & Ad Block Plus. I have one called StatusBar Ex, which tells me how much RAM is being used at any time. Yeah, there are other ways to find this out, but this sits on my status bar & I see it just by lowering my eyes down there, instead of trying to figure out where System Information is in Windows 7.

And right now I'm using Scribe Fire to write my blog. Great little program that splits your screen in half. Top half is the website you are on, the bottom half is the blog editor. This way, you can read a site & comment on it at the same time.

Thats the good. Now to the bad. Extensions that sort of work like Reminder Fox, which for me would remind me that something was happening at some time. It just wouldn't tell me what. No matter what I did, I couldn't get it to save what I was listing. As opposed to non-official add-on Remember the Milk, which works perfectly.

Or Foxy Tunes, always recommended by AMO, despite it never working for me. What I wanted was something that would tell me what I was listening to at any time, like itunes mini player, which BTW, doesn't work on Windows 7, after working perfectly on XP. Come on Bill & Steve!

And finally, the useless. Add-ons that just don't work, for whatever reason. This morning I finally downloaded Fox-TV. Yuck. As useless as the actual network. Supposedly allows you to watch tv from around the world. Well there are channels listed, but every one I went on said "broken channel", with a blank page. Nice going. I suggest you go back to programming school & learn to write extensions properly.

Lots of people run toolbars & editing add-ons. I have no interest in that. I am not a big geek. I just like having a little bit of extras. Security stuff to protect me & my computer. Stuff that tells me whats going on. The stuff like direct toolbars so I can write something for Digg or Twitter. No thanks. But I'm sure there are people that use these. It's whatever you want your browser & your computer to do. And that's what I like.

Ubuntu on a stick!

Among the things I like to do on my free days is , well, play with technology. My new computer runs, obviously, Windows 7. But I like to experiment, fool around, if you will. So I have the latest Ubuntu on a 4GB USB stick.

For the few people reading this who don't know what I'm talking about, Ubuntu is the most popular version of Linux, the free open source operating system developed by a finnish programming student in the early 90's. Linux, because it is open can be re-coded by anyone or any business. This is why there are 300 versions, called distros. Each uses the Linux kernel (the OS-Windows has one too). That is the system basically. Then you load on a filing system, a download program & everything else.

Most distros are based on one of three main distros, Debian, Red Hat or Slackware, which is what most people think of when hearing Linux. using the command line to do stuff. Debian has the biggest packages & is the easiest system to use. That's what Ubuntu is based on.

There are multiple ways to use Ubuntu. the easiest is to use a "live cd". This can be used without touching your hard drive. The problem is that when you shut down & remove the cd, it forgets everything you have done. If you downloaded anything, it just goes away. So creating a file is impossible.

A better way is what I did. I ran the live cd, & when I got to the desktop, I went in the Gnome system menu & opened the Startup Disk Creator. I plugged in my USB stick, click on the listing (4GB file system), & clicked "create startup disk". After about a half hour I had the entire Ubuntu distro on this stick. Now when I want to run it, I plug the stick in a USB port, turn on my computer, & when the HP screen comes on I hit Esc, which brings up the boot menu. I click the listing for the stick (San Disk), & Ubuntu loads instead of Windows.

Now Linux has a small market share. One percent compared to Windows 90%. It has no viruses, partly because the way Linux is written, very secure. But let's face it, the bad guys are not going to write a virus for that teeny share-what's the point? So, why not a bigger market share? The reputation that you have to be a programming genius to use it. Of course, different distros work differently. Ubuntu was written for you & me. The default browser is Firefox, which I use on Windows, & is the 2nd most used around the world. The office suite is Open Office by Oracle, which I used on my XP machine.

The problem is it's issues with drivers & hardware. Many horror stories about Linux not recognizing printers & wifi. Geeks may spend days fixing these issues. I don't have the patience. One of the easiest things is downloading software. Linux doesn't want you going to sites, so there is a built in package manager. in Ubuntu it is at the bottom of applications. You click on it, it takes you to the repositories, you find what you want ( a music player, an e-mail program, flash, whatever), & click "install". That's all. But because of the issues some stuff doesn't work great. Video for instance. So I use it to surf without having to worry about viruses. Until Linux fixes all it's issues it will remain obscure. But hey, it's fun to play with stuff, right?

Intel inside McAfee?

One of the more interesting developments in the technology world was last weeks sale of McAfee, the second largest security software company to Intel, the world’s largest maker of integrated circuits. The original guess is that intel wants to imbed security software inside their chips.
Now while this sounds like a logical thing to do, why spend $7 billion to buy McAfee, instead of just signing a deal to make special chips that do this? My original thought is that McAfee, or any security company, wouldn’t want to. See, they don’t make their money selling anti-virus software to customers. The price of most products is around $30-80. No, they make their money off the yearly subscriptions.
Buy McAfee anti-virus or the internet suite. A year later you have to renew your subscription. It’s a never ending cash cow. Kind of like Microsoft doesn’t make money off Windows (every computer comes with it). They make money off of Office. $100-$300 for every copy bought, either by you 7 me, or a company buying huge amounts for all the computers they have. Same with security software. I don’t know how companies & their IT department deal with it, but I’m sure that McAfee & it’s larger competitor Symantic make a ton this way.
I found it interesting to note that McAfee’s sales were around $2B & Symantic had sales of $35B. that’s a biggg difference. That’s because of their dealings with businesses & the computer industry. My new computer came with a trial version of Norton. Symantic figures after a month you will buy a full copy. If anti-virus is imbedded in the chips in the computer, you won’t have to do that. That’s why Intel bought McAfee. The story goes that Symantic will be bought by IBM or some other big company. But why not Intel’s #1 rival AMD? Maybe they realize it’s not that good a deal.

What a bunch of Twits!

One of my favorite things to do on my afternoons off is listen to tech podcasts. It’s a way of keeping up on the “next new thing”, & updates on stuff I have read about on the web. So there is a “cottage industry” run by a guy named Leo LaPorte, who’s based in Petaluma (north of SF). His business, as it were, is Twittv. That stands for This Week in Tech. There are at least ten different weekly podcasts, both audio & video, devoted to all things technology.
He hosts some of them, co-hosts others, & still others have other people doing them. For instance, Tech News Daily is hosted by a guy named Tom Merrit, who usually has a female co-host, & they talk about tech from, obviously, a daily viewpoint. This week in Science has Dr. Kiki, who talks about anything related to that area.
But the big show is TWIT. One to two hours talking about what happened the last week. LaPorte has a great sense of humor, which helps if you’re not a total nerd, which I am not. He has 2 or 3 guests for the entire show, who rotate. John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine, among various projects is on probably every other or every third week. He is the curmudgeon of tech & makes for quite an entertaining guest. But actually, most of the guests are good. Informative, but also just plain fun.
This show goes over probably 5 or 6 topics a week. Lots of time spent discussing the latest smart phone, but also, a lot of time was spent on the whole missing iphone/gizmodo debacle, the facebook privacy issue, the release of the ipad, recently the infamous Google/Verizon net neutrality bugaboo.
I love this show, much more than the others. Tech News Today is a little dry, Windows Weekly seems to cover the same ground as TWIT, although the non Microsoft stuff isn’t there. It is informative, not boring, & hey, it kills 2 hours.

What is all this @#$%! and how do I get rid of it?

The worst thing about getting a new computer is all the crapware included. I don’t know how many of these programs I have on my computer or what any of them do. I must have at least three DVD programs, & as far as I can tell, none of them actually allow you to burn to a blank DVD. So what are they for? One seems to be to create a slide show of photos. Whoopee. Can’t I do that anyway? One simply allows you to watch movies they have listed. Uh, isn’t that what Netflix & Hulu are for? And BTW, one of the programs is called Hulu Desktop. It gives offline access to a limited number of programs. Really not very good. There is also a Netflix application. Uh, I have that website bookmarked since I am a subscriber, so again-why is this needed?
Then there is all the stuff that HP included. Tech support stuff. OK. Media stuff (don’t even understand that stuff) , HP Advisor which I guess is tech support, the HP store(can’t I just go online for that?), & HP Games. This is a trick. They let you play popular games, but what you don’t know is that you can only play them a couple of times, then you have to buy them. Of course, if you got hooked on a game, you will. Nice. The worst is an annoying toolbar that you can’t get rid of. It’s not on your browser, it’s on the desktop. It has links to all these HP sites, & can’t find a way to get rid of it. If it’s in Add & Remove Programs, I don’t know what it’s called. Thanks a lot, jerks.
Of course it came with a trial of the much hated Norton. Never ran it, finally uninstalled it. Don’t need or want that bloated computer slowing junk, no thank you. I use Avira, the free antivirus from a company in Germany that has one of the highest rates of detection out there.
On the other hand, Windows has stupidly installed something called Office Starter 2010. This is a free, cutdown version of Word & Excel, with a small changing ad in the right bottom. I can handle it. In fact I’m writing this on Word. From what I’ve read, the full, expensive version is actually installed. I just have to click & pay for it. Then it opens, replacing the starter. Don’t need it, this is just fine. I’m sure a lot of people will think this way, thus depriving Microsoft of extra money. Or is this just a way of getting people to use the real Word & Excel instead of Open Office, which is what I used on my old computer? If so, it’s actually a pretty smart thing to do.

Where's the manual?

So I just bought a new computer last month. An HP Pavilion with a DVD Burner. To explain: my previous computer (which is now in the closet) was 8 years old & had a 40 GB hard drive. I know, you’re saying “40, don’t you mean 400”. Nope, 40. 768 MB of RAM & a 2.0 GHZ processor. This one has 640 GB of storage. Like I’m ever gonna use that. And 4 GB of RAM. Good for video, I guess. ESPN’s requirements are quite high, which is why watching sports on their website was painful.

But here’s the thing. Not all of us are computer geniuses or geeks. We need to know what to do when setteing up this stuff. So why is there no manual with this thing? I had to go to Borders & spend $20 on a book to find out what my new computer does & how to use it. Mind you, my old system ran XP, this one runs Windows 7, which is quite different. I mean I bought a $40 Waterpik for teeth cleaning. THAT came with a manual, but a $600 computer, not so much.

This seems to be the new thing. Spend lots of money on technology, then once you leave the store, or in my case, once it comes FEDEX, you’re on your own. Why is that? It’s not like HP gets extra money by selling you a manual separately, because they don’t have one. So you go to the bookstore & have to decide between about 20 different books. Wonderful. And mind you, every computer is different. I want to know about the specific software loaded on this thing. Lots of HP stuff & other stuff. Games, a bunch of media software that I can’t figure out. The books won’t have that, but a manual might.

I think its laziness & cheapness. Same with my new printer. No manual. Just a stupid poster. Yeah, I figured out how to set it up, but really. Also, you sell a printer without a cable that connects it to the computer? Duh. And no, that’s not so HP makes extra money because they don’t make cables. So Belkin gets money that they shouldn’t because the industry is dumb.

Well enough ranting for now. I’m going to watch a podcast I downloaded from itunes. I burned a DVD, so I could watch it on my TV, just to see if I could & to at least use the DVD burner, only to find out the DVD player hooked up to my TV doesn’t read DVD-R discs. Only commercial pre-written Hollywood discs. Lovely, so I have a completely useless DVD burner. Isn’t technology wonderful?