Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category

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Anti-Glare Solution For Glossy Macs

Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

We just set up a spiffy new 24″ Aluminum iMac in the graphics department at work; what a gorgeous display on that thing! Unfortunately, Apple has decided for us that you can have any finish you want on your monitor, as long as it’s glossy. And that was one of the things the new user on that machine just couldn’t abide.

I checked around a bit, and found a lot of people are grousing about the glossy screens, most of them in the graphics industry. With the glossy screen you get a lot of reflection from anything around you, especially in a well-lit room. That not only makes adjusting color difficult, it’s really, really distracting. Personally, I don’t think I’d mind it so much, but the user on this particular machine isn’t quite as accommodating as yours-truly.

One solution would be to dim the lights in the room, but that isn’t a realistic possibility at work, in a large room with cubicles. In digging around for a solution to the glossy screen problem, I did find a few solutions. One that does show some promise is sold by NuShield:

NuShield AG™ Antiglare Screen Protector Film

The harsh lighting in most office and industrial environments can make it almost impossible to do your job well when you have to rely on hard-to-read LCD screens. After a year in development, NuShield AG Antiglare Screen Protector Film will minimize annoying surface glare under bright lights indoors or in an office/industrial setting. The antiglare film also hides fingerprints and filters out 99% of UV light from reaching the screen or reflecting back to your eyes.

NuShield films are non-adhesive, held in place by tabs that wedge between the edge of the screen and the case. I would imagine static and suction also help to keep it in place, but I do like the no-adhesive thing. NuShield makes films for all kinds of applications, mostly to improve the durability of flat panel screens on monitors, laptops and handhelds.

There’s not much on their website that isn’t marketing material; I suppose it’s a little difficult to demonstrate the effectiveness of a product like this with just photos. But the film isn’t terribly expensive, so I just ordered one for the iMac ($35) and one for my PowerBook ($15) as well. They have a handy-dandy product selector that shows custom-cut film to fit most all of the Apple products with built-in screens, and lots of other manufacturers also. So I figured it’d be ok to spend the money to give it a whirl (especially when it’s not my money!) I’ll post an update once my order arrives and I have it installed.

Another possibility is to use a hood over the monitor. There was a day when hoods were pretty much standard equipment on high-end CRT monitors, but it’s been years since I threw the last one out. They usually ended up stashed under a desk, collecting dust. Well, they’re still out there; Compushade makes a universal fit model, priced in the mid-$40 range, and Photodon makes a much nicer hood, custom-fit for the iMacs for about the same money. Another option is to go with some cardboard cut to fit and spray-painted flat black. We’ll see how the film works out, and decide whether to give the hood a try.

Edit: Click here to go to the review I wrote for the NuShield film.

Posted in Computers, Cool Technology | Comments Closed

Windows Rant Of The Day: Removable Disks

Monday, October 27th, 2008

When something on a computer works well and works the way it should — intuitively — it’s said to be “Mac-like”. Windows XP and Vista are said to have many “Mac-like” features. But in working with XP the last few years, I’m left to wonder how could something as simple as adding a removable drive can be so decidedly un-Mac-like. I’m talking about connecting and disconnecting a removable drive from a computer.

In the Mac OS, connecting & disconnecting any kind of external storage device to the system is painless & simple. Whether it be a USB thumb drive, a digital camera with onboard storage, or an external drive (connected via USB, Firewire, eSATA, or whatever), connecting it is a matter of plugging it into the appropriate port; the icon representing that volume (or volumes) appears on the desktop, and away you go. When you’re done with the device, you click on the volume on your desktop (or in a Finder window) and pull down in the Finder’s File menu to Eject (or hit Command-E, or drag the volume to the Trash). Once the device’s icon is gone, you can physically disconnect the device from the Mac. If there are files still in use, the system will complain by throwing up an alert; after you close whatever file is still open, then try again. Simple, straightforward, painless.

Using USB thumb drives and true removable media isn’t much more difficult in Windows, but it’s still far from “Mac-like”. When you plug in a storage device it’ll usually pop up several bubbles on the system tray telling you it recognizes the device, and it’s ready to go. Sometimes you’ll need to install drivers for it, which is for the most part painless, but still, it’s one more step. Pulling the plug on the thing is when it gets interesting. An icon for the Safely Remove Hardware applet pops into the system tray when the device is plugged in; right-click on that icon and you get a somewhat confusing series of two or three dialog boxes that allow you to stop access to the device so it can be disconnected.

Trying to do the same thing in Windows XP with a hard drive is a bit trickier, and so unMac-like it’s not even funny. I wrongly assumed that you could eject a drive from a Windows system like you could from a Mac; if nothing else, you could use the Safely Remove Hardware doodad for that. But not so.

Last week I tried setting up a hot-swappable SATA drive (a Diamond Hard Drive Kit from Addonics) and a pair of 1TB drives on a PC at work… My plan was to have Retrospect back up the servers and several desktops to the hot-swap drive, then once a week I’d pull the drive out and replace it with another identical unit, always keeping one offsite for safety. That was the plan anyway. But Windows is making life difficult for me.

Physically installing the drive tray in the PC and connecting it to the onboard SATA bus was pretty straightforward, as was setting up the disk after it was installed and the system booted up. But once the disk was mounted and accessible, what then? How do you eject it? With the Addonics unit, there is a key switch on the front panel that cuts power to the drive so that it can be removed. Nice feature and all, but Windows doesn’t allow such a thing to happen gracefully. In fact, hot swapping of drives is not natively supported in any current Windows product.

I did some Googling to see if there were any 3rd party solutions for getting around this, and found a few that promised help in the task, but all were basically trying to trick Windows into thinking the disk was removable. They weren’t very convincing, and the system caught it every time. It’s still possible to cut power on the drive & pull it out. The system puts an error in the log complaining that some corruption might have occurred, and from what I was able to find, corruption does happen. Not terribly common, but it does happen. And when I’m yanking a 1TB drive out, it’s fairly important to me that the data remain intact. On top of the threat of corruption, the system was running pretty funkily when I did hot swaps without the proper tools. It took forever to recover from a reboot, and it just felt sluggish. So I had to find another way.

Digging a little further, I found something on the Addonics website telling me what I’ve learned the hard way:

Q4. I want to swap hard drive in and out of my computer without restarting my computer, will the Diamond drive kit support this and what components do I need?
A. The Diamond Drive Cartridge System is designed for the hot swapping of drives without rebooting the computer. The Diamond Drive Cartridge System with SATA interface must be connected to a hot-swap compatible SATA controller. If this is not done, the removal or insertion of a Diamond enclosure will cause the system to freeze or reboot.

Shame on me; I should have seen that before. The Windows OS doesn’t support hot-swapping drives without the proper hardware. Although the computer’s onboard SATA controller hardware will accept up to four SATA devices, it won’t allow hot-swapping, at least not without the proper adapter card. So I went shopping for a card that will allow hot swapping & found a fairly inexpensive one for not a lot of money; the PNY SATA S-Cure RAID card for $35. It arrived yesterday, I got it installed, and it worked great until I cut the power on the drive and pulled it out. At first it didn’t seem that the drive was gone at all because the system showed it still active — must’ve been cached information. After a few minutes the controller’s software had a conniption fit about the drive being gone, even after the drive had been reinserted and powered on again. I finally had to restart the machine to get it back to square one. Sheesh. As it turns out, I should have bought a non-RAID card; the card I bought was a RAID card, and will add and release disks that are part of an array, but won’t allow standalone disks to be connected & disconnected at will. A non-RAID supposedly will allow the SATA disk to appear as a removable drive to the system. A-shopping I will go. Again. With crossed fingers.

For a short while I thought the solution would be to move the Addonics hot swap unit to a Mac, then share the drive over the network as a Windows volume. But the problem there is that native SATA support didn’t happen on the Mac until the G5’s hit the market, and none of the spare machines I have on hand or slated for semi-retirement (all G4’s) would be up to the job, at least not without adding an adapter card. The PNY RAID card might work in the Mac, but…

All in all, the whole removable drive thing was a learning experience for me. The Mac may have had a leg up on the Windows machine, but because the Mac lacked the hardware to make it happen, I won’t find out any time soon. A question that remains unanswered is whether the Windows OS is unable to make use of the hot-swap feature because of a hardware shortcoming or if it’s software; I suspect it’s Windows, and am happy to lay the blame there (unless someone can prove me wrong.) If I were to install the unit in a G5, an Intel Mac, or say, a Psystar machine running OS X, with a spare onboard SATA port… Would the OS have a hard time with the drive being ejected? I’m pretty sure it would happen there without incident.

As for using a plain vanilla removable drive on a Mac vs. a PC, the usability difference highlights one of the major benefits of using a Mac. A much superior user experience in that respect, and many more.

Bonus Hint: The Safely Remove Hardware app is tucked away for safe keeping (I guess) and launching it without inserting a removable drive, while not impossible, isn’t easy. I found a discussion thread where someone posted a trick to do it; just right-click on your Desktop to create a New Shortcut. In the Create Shortcut dialog box that comes up, it’ll ask you to type the location of the item; type (or paste) %windir%\system32\rundll32.dll.Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll into that field, click Next, and give the shortcut a name, then you’ve got handy-dandy quick access to the SRH applet. As handy as that can be, anyway.

Posted in Computers, Work | Comments Closed

Windows Rant Of The Day — Finding A File Path

Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

Here’s one place where the Macintosh really, really shines compared to Windows…

Let’s say you have a document open in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, on either platform. Like many users, you just fired up the app and opened it through the handy-dandy Recent Documents list, just like you’ve done daily since you originated that document a month or so ago. And like many users you have no clue where on your hard drive you saved that particular file. But now, Gertrude in the next cubicle, or Hector in the Mexico City office, needs a copy of that file… How do you figure out where to find it?

On the Mac, just hold down the Command (Apple) key and click on the document title bar. A menu showing every step in the file path drops down. Pull down and click in any step in that menu, and you’re taken to that directory/folder. While it’s not exactly intuitive — you probably won’t find that trick in any of the Office apps’ menus — it’s easy as can be once you know it. Once you see the file, you can copy it to a flash drive, drag it to an email message, burn it to a CD, or whatever.

If you’re on a PC, well, it’s a different story. Emailing the file is pretty straightforward; click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Send — Email. That still doesn’t tell you where you can find the file, but Microsoft dumbs down that process enough to make it work. But what if you really need to burn that file to a CD or copy it to a thumb drive… how do you track down the location of the file?

Not sure if this is the best way, but after much digging around in the Office 2007 menus, what I found is that you can click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Prepare — Properties; that opens up a Document Properties bar just below The Ribbon, which includes a Location: field that shows the full file path for the file. From there you can select & copy the path, then paste it into an Explorer window. Yeah. That’s intuitive.

These examples refer to the Microsoft Office suite in both the Mac OS and in Windows; the same trick works in all apps on the Mac because it’s part of the OS. In Windows… the same trick will likely take different steps in different apps. That’s just the way it works in Winders.

And once again, the Mac OS smacks the snot out of Windows.

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Why Is A Computer A Stupid Machine?

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

I was browsing through some of the recent visitors to davintosh.com just now (as I am wont to do), and came across an interesting item. When a hit is registered from a search engine, Sitemeter also shows what the terms entered into the search field. This one was interesting:

stupid_computer_sm.jpg
(click on the image to see the whole report)

Although I’ve told others that a computer is nothing but a stupid machine and does only what it’s told, and I’ve sometimes wondered why a computer can’t be at least a little more intelligent, I can’t say I’ve ever thought to Google for an answer to it. No surprise though that the system at the other end was Windows XP and Internet Exploder; I’d expect the user has a big goose egg on his forehead from banging his head against the desk.

The best part though is he thought the answer could be found here. I’m gonna be grinning over that one for a while.

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Samsung Customer Disservice

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

This sucks. Samsung has just ripped me off, and I’m more than just a little angry about it.

I bought a manufacturer recertified 22″ flat panel monitor (model 225BW) eCost.com in late February (which was delivered and put into use in early March). The monitor worked fine at first, but in the last week developed a problem with the DVI input; nothing connected to the DVI port will produce an image (but the VGA port does still work.)

Since it was a remanufactured unit, I first called eCost, and was told that they only warrant the remanufactured monitors for 30 days; I’d have to go to the manufacturer. The first representative I spoke with at Samsung informed me that because the purchase date was more than 90 days ago (95 days, to be exact) the 90-day warranty has expired, and there is no recourse. I tried to explain that I did not actually take possession of the monitor until March 4, and that I contacted them about the issue as soon as I could, but that didn’t matter — the warranty period is measured from the date of purchase, and there are no exceptions for remanufactured items. A second representative in their so-called “Executive Group” told me the same, and again refused to make an exception.

I am the sole IT support guy for my small business employer, and was the one who made the original purchase. I am also the one on whom my not very geeky coworkers rely for technical support issues. This problem first surface last week, when I happened to be on vacation, so the people here naturally waited until my return to get the problem resolved. I made the call at my first opportunity after returning to work this morning, but yet my request for service was denied. Logically, the warranty would either have a little bit of a grace period to allow for situations like this, or they would measure the warranty period by the date I took possession of the item, especially when purchased from an online retailer. I have no control over the item until I take physical possession of it at the time of delivery; why should the warranty begin before that time?

It’s also very disappointing. I can understand that Samsung would want to stick to its warranty policy, but what this is telling me is that the organization is governed more by blind adherence to policy than by logic; extenuating circumstances apparently don’t mean a thing to them. It also tells me that they don’t want to stand behind their repair work… This monitor was presumably returned to their facilities and reworked by their personnel to what is deemed to be acceptable working condition. In this case, the monitor worked fine up to almost the day the warranty expired, which unfortunately happened to coincide with my time off from work. Now, a mere five business days beyond that magic date, I’m left out in the cold with a monitor that half works. The big question here is whether I could expect the same level of repair quality for an item returned to Samsung for warranty repairs. It doesn’t bode well for them.

I have purchased a good number of Samsung products in the past, and have had few issues with them; in fact, I have a Samsung monitor on my own desk. But… you can be guaranteed that this incident marks the last of Samsung products being purchased by me for personal use or for use in this organization, as long as I’m making the purchasing decisions. They just lost a customer. Forever.

Yeah, I realize buying remanufactured products is sometimes a shot in the dark, but still… this is very telling of Samsung’s customer service and public relations arm. And of their in-house service.

Thanks for letting me vent a little more. I realize that vengeance isn’t mine, and my little blog entry won’t cause but a small ding in Samsung’s reputation, but I feel a little better. Just a little.

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Stupid Computer Trick — VNC Echo

Friday, May 16th, 2008

At work I’m messing around with setting up a new machine running Leopard… I was having trouble figuring out how best to access network shares and a helpful guy on the Apple Support Discussions Board pointed me to the Columns View in a Finder Window. When you click on the icon for a machine on the network that has file and Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) screen sharing enabled, you get two buttons; Connect As… and Share Screen…

Now while I was setting up the Leopard machine, I had it sitting in the opposite corner of my cubicle with a standard mouse & keyboard attached, and was getting some wrist pain from that, so I set up ARD screen sharing through VNC on the Leopard machine so I could control it from my PowerBook or the PC. I also have ARD screen sharing through VNC set up on my PowerBook, so…

When I finally figured out to look for the Connect As… button in the the Columns View, of course my first thought when I saw that Share Screen… button was, “Hmmm. What does that do?” So being the geek that I am I clicked it, it asked for my password, and up popped a view of my PowerBook screen. Inside that was a view of the Leopard screen, and inside that was a view of my PowerBook screen, and inside that… You get the idea. Very cool indeed!

Oh, and I almost forgot… I’m controlling my PowerBook through my Lenovo PC via Synergy and QuickSynergy (my post on that here). So it’s Lenovo — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — PowerBook — Leopard on Intel — ad infinitum…

vnc_ard_echo_sm.jpg
(click on the image for a full-size screenshot)

Vine Viewer is able to record movies of what’s going on, and once I figure out how to get the file size down a ways (right now it’s full-resolution, and 240MB) I’ll post it, just for fun.

Update: Here it is. Enjoy!

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Psystar — On Its Way!

Sunday, May 4th, 2008

Yes indeed, it’s really happening. On Wednesday I got a confirmation email from Psystar with a valid UPS tracking number. It’ll be delivered by May 5 (feliz Cinco de Mayo!)

confirmation_480px.jpg

Huzzah!

As cool as that is, I’m certainly not the first to get one; several people have already received the machines they ordered, and one guy sent video and photos to Gizmodo. It’s been a bit funny — yet sobering — reading through posts and comments on Gizmodo; the initial posts were pretty skeptical in nature, and only fueled my own skepticism, but now the tone has changed to disdain for those silly enough to actually purchase one of the machines. Many of the comments are tainted with a base hatred of anything Mac, which is to be expected from that crowd.

I knew up front that buying this machine would be a shot in the dark, and bought it with a Plan B that would put the purchased OS and hardware to work in different roles in the event that they couldn’t be effectively used together. Another article at Gizmodo has a good list of reasons to avoid buying a Mac OS machine from Psystar, and although many of their reasons are very valid, I had considered most of them before buying. The one that will keep this machine out of graphics production is the inability to use Software Update, and the inability to do a reinstall. Oh well. On to Plan B.

But then the reported noise level issue may make even Plan B unworkable, so a Plan C may be needed — putting the hardware into a server role of some sort, or swapping out fans or power supply. But then again, it seems that Psystar is reacting fairly rapidly to customer concerns, so it may well be that this won’t be an issue with mine.

We’ll see.

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Psystar — Almost There…

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Excuse me while I pick myself up off the floor and bring my lower jaw back in line with the rest of my teeth…

I just got a phone call from a polite young man by the name of Jose from Psystar to let me know about the delay with the white cases, which would delay my order unless I switched to a black case. I confirmed that switching to the black case was fine with me, and he let me know that the machine would ship within a day or so. From the voice on the line, my guess is that Jose is the same guy who did the speaking part for the a href=”http://www.psystar.com/a_peek_at_the_open_computers.html”>video posted on their website last week.

Granted, there still is no outside confirmation that anything has or will ship, but I’ve got to tell you that if the whole Psystar thing is a scam, these guys are running the con far beyond what you’d expect. If it were a con and I was running it, a phone call to the customers definitely wouldn’t be part of the plan.

Posted in Computers, Psystar Open | Comments Closed

The Virtual KVM

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

These days at work I’m supporting both Macs and PC’s. With recent change in my job responsibilities, the PC side is eclipsing the Mac somewhat (and no, I’m not liking it so much!) I finally broke down this month and purchased a real live modern Windows XP machine to go on my desk (which replaced a dog-slow 1.5GHz P4 machine). It’s a nice Lenovo ThinkCentre AMD-powered machine that I got off the clearance rack at a great price through CDW. I loaded it up with lots of RAM, a big hard drive, a DVD/CD writer, and it’s almost a pleasure to work on. Almost. But I’m neither ready nor willing to give up my PowerBook, and thankfully, since I am still responsible for the Mac end of things, I keep it.

I already had a nice 22″ flat panel Samsung monitor that I’d hook up to the PowerBook while at work, and thought it could work for both machines with a USB KVM switch between the three devices, but had some difficulty getting the Belkin unit I have on hand to work. So I went shopping online for a replacement, with DVI connectors instead of the VGA on mine. But then I happened across a neat piece of software that works so slick, I dropped those plans altogether…

It’s called Synergy, which is an Open Source utility which allows you to set up two or more computers — each with it’s own monitor — and use one keyboard & mouse to control all of them. (So I guess my title on this post is a little off, since it’s more of a Virtual KM switch, but oh well!)

quicksynergy_icon.jpg

On my desk, the Windows machine acts as the “server” portion of my setup — because the keyboard & mouse are plugged into it — and the PowerBook, being a portable, acts as the client. The setup instructions were a little obscure; definitely not written for the Mac “fire it up and it just works” crowd, but I got it configured ok on the windows side. The Mac side of the software downloaded from the Synergy SourceForge page was totally baffling, so to Google I went for help. What I found is that I wasn’t alone in having trouble getting it to work, but thankfully some kind soul put a GUI on the Open Source code and made it Mac-easy. Downloaded QuickSynergy, draged it to the Applications folder, fired it up, entered the server’s IP address in the Client tab and hit Start; that’s it.

So now I’ve got the Lenovo box hooked up to the keyboard, monitor & mouse, and the PowerBook on a stand right next to the monitor. I move the cursor to the right side of the monitor and it hops over to the PowerBook, just as if the PowerBook’s screen is an extended desktop on the PC, and like the mouse is connected directly to the PowerBook. And when I need a larger screen on the Mac, I push the mouse over to the Mac side, plug the DVI cable into the side of the PowerBook, and press the input switch on the monitor (the PC uses the VGA input.) Extended desktop on the Mac, controlled via the keyboard & mouse on the PC. Several people at work think it’s magic; I almost have to agree with them.

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Yes, the Apple BlueTooth keyboard is still sitting there, only because it hasn’t found a new home yet, but it did come in handy while getting things set up. You’ll notice the Logitech TrackMan Wheel on the keyboard drawer; one of the best input devices ever. My hand rests on top of it, my thumb rolls the ball to move the cursor, and I get no wrist pain. Unless of course I end up working on someone else’s machine for an extended time.

Even though the keyboard is Windows-centric, I have no trouble with on the Mac side. The Alt key acts as the Apple key, and the Windows key acts as the Option key. No muss, no fuss. However, I do have trouble remembering which keyboard command to use depending on which machine is being controlled at a given time; most keyboard shortcuts on the Mac involve using the Apple (Command) key, but in Windows it’s Ctrl. Copy on the Mac is Apple-C (or rather Alt-C on the physical keyboard), but Ctrl-C on the Windows side. Ditto with Paste, Undo, Cut, etc… Not a huge issue, but it really drives me nuts some days!

In the photo you also see the Windows Server 2003 screensaver, which is running inside a VMWare console in the foreground on the main monitor; what a cool app that is, and for free even. VMWare lets you run a virtual machine inside a machine — I’ve been using it test on an upgrade to our print management database system (looking forward to that like a root canal) — in much the same way that Virtual PC allowed you to emulate a PC inside a Mac in years past. And at that price it can’t be beat. Another neat thing is that the VMWare site has a huge library of virtual appliances that you can download (either for free or for a price, depending on the device). The virtual appliances are all preconfigured, along with the properly configured OS, and will do any number of chores for you on a network. It’s too amazing for a sidebar here, so I may have to write about that later.

Posted in Computers, Cool Technology | Comments Closed

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