From iMovie to YouTube, a.s.a.p.

Imagine this, if you will. You've put together your iMovie masterpiece and want to share it with friends and family. No problem, fire it through to iDVD and send them a DVD - right? But suppose it's a very short clip, or the friends and relatives in question are more of the 'casual acquaintance' variety? Is it still appropriate to physically send a DVD? This was the quandary I was in (short clips, not casual relatives) - so I decided to make use of YouTube.

Now, we know that YouTube wants the video to be in certain formats so they can convert it to the Flash movie that YouTube viewers see. On top of that YouTube specifically recommends divx or xvid video with MP3 audio to achieve the "best results". If the video or audio is in the wrong format you end up with a movie missing the video or audio (as I discovered on several occasions during this process ).

The problem is finding a video and audio format which - in order of importance - (a) is compatible with YouTube, (b) is as small as possible to reduce upload time, and (c) encodes reasonably quickly and directly from iMovie without any intermediate apps such as ffmpegX.

After a lot experimentation I have found that H.264 video with AAC audio offers the best combination of encoding speed, file size (and hence upload time), and being available from within iMovie itself. The fact that YouTube accepted H.264 was a surprise to me but given the format's excellent video quality it was definitely a most pleasant one!

Here's what I did and the settings I used:

1. Start with your video clip in iMovie. Highlight the video in the Clips panel so that it is displayed in the large preview window. Click File:Export.

2. You should now see something similar to the image below. Choose 'Expert settings'. Click 'Share'.


3. You are now given a save dialog box similar to the one below. Click on the 'Export' drop-down menu and choose 'Movie to QuickTime Movie'. Click Options.


4. You should now see the Movie Settings panel as shown below. In the video section click 'Settings'.


5. Now we get to choose our video format. Set the 'Compression Type' to H.264 with a frame rate of 15 fps with automatic key frames. I have found that a 'Low' quality setting with 'Best Quality' multi-pass encoding produced video that is perfectly sufficient for YouTube. Click OK. (See that preview? That's why this blog has been kinda quiet recently )


6. Back at the Movie Settings panel you already saw in step 4, click the audio 'Settings' button.

7. Now we choose an audio format. Unless your home video has some kind of superb stereo sound (unlikely), we can save some space here by choosing a mono format and reducing the bitrate. Set the format to AAC, choose Mono from the channels drop-down menu, change the 'Rate' (frequency) to 22.050 kHz, and choose a target bit rate of 24 kbps. Click OK.


8. Back at the Movie Settings panel again. Make sure 'Prepare for internet streaming' is deselected.

9. Still at the Movie Settings panel. In the video section click 'Size'. You'll probably need a calculator here. My source video was from a European digital camera, so it is PAL video with frame sizes of 784 x 576 (essentially a 4:3 aspect ratio). YouTube's default video size is 425 pixels wide so we'll aim for that width, which means to preserve our aspect ratio our video should be 312 pixels tall (784/425 = 576/312). Choose 'Custom' dimensions and plug in the frame size you just calculated. I also, hopefully unnecessarily, check the 'Preserve aspect ratio' box using 'Letterbox'. Raincoat and an umbrella, you know? Check the 'Deinterlace Source Video' box. Click OK.


10. Back at the Movie Settings panel from step 4 ... hopefully for the last time. Click OK.

11. You should now be back at the save dialog box from step 3. Give your exported movie a name, and click 'save'. iMovie will now show you a progress bar for your export.

On my 2.16GHz Core Duo MacBook Pro a 3 minute iMovie clip takes about 10 minutes to export using this method, and ends up being about 3 megabytes in size. This in turn takes me about 3 minutes to upload to YouTube on my bog-standard 2 megabit ADSL broadband with it's pitiful 256k upload speed. For me that is a quick-enough process to make using YouTube as painless as possible. And it keeps the rellies happy!

Airport Extreme 802.11n setup problems - solved

So ... the Airport Extreme 802.11n base station (mentioned last week) arrived safely. On the same day I received a new LaCie Porsche Design 320GB USB hard disk (don't laugh, this drive had the best dollars to gigabytes ratio out of all the major vendors' offerings). I was too busy to do anything with the equipment for the first few days but eventually found an hour to set it all up. Little did I know how much more time I would need ...

A little background first. My current setup consists of an Airport Express in my living room connected to ADSL and a stereo. I have a Canon MP750 multifunction printer but it's upstairs in the study meaning I have to take my MacBook Pro upstairs to print anything. I wanted to connect the printer wirelessly, but without running very long cables from the living room to the study. Also due to rapidly shrinking free hard disk space on my laptop I have lately been wanting to install a network hard drive, so when the Airport Extreme (from now on referred to as AEN) was announced it looked like just the thing since it would also solve my printer problem. My plan was to connect the AEN to the printer and a USB hard drive, while continuing to use the Express downstairs for the ADSL and stereo.


Connecting all the appropriate cables was very simple - just a power cord each for the hard drive and the AEN and a USB cable between them. Inserted the CD that comes with the AEN and installed the software. Beyond this point I was expecting a mostly-automated configuration via Airport Utility which 'just worked'. Unfortunately Airport Utility assumes you are setting up a new network and doesn't seem to allow for joining an existing one. This meant I had to configure it manually...

Two days later, and many boring hours trawling the internet, I am finally done. It's been a long and arduous journey! And not at all what I've come to expect from Apple gear. What follows is a brief description of the problems I encountered.

The actual setup
You might recall that I wanted to keep my Airport Express in its current role and add the new AEN to connect the printer and hard drive. Now I foolishly assumed this meant I should use the AEN to extend my existing network and wasted a couple of already-scarce hours troubleshooting the faulty setup. Once I finally realised that I needed to use a WDS network and set the Express to WDS Main mode and the AEN to WDS Remote mode things started to look up - a little. While both Airport units were visible on the same network, I couldn't see my hard drive. After more research on the Apple 802.11n forums I came across several recommendations to reformat the hard drive to fix non-visible drive issues. Following this advice I connected the drive directly to one of my Mac's USB ports and formatted it as Mac OS X Extended (not journalled) and - Eureka! - the drive was now visible in Airport Disk Utility and could be mounted with the name 'AirDisk'. The light on the AEN was still flashing orange, but I didn't care. Success! Or so I thought ...

Teething problems
One of the first things I did was to start copying my iTunes library to the newly mounted AirDisk. This was something I wanted to do anyway to free up some space on my laptop hard disk and I thought I could get a feel of the AirDisk's speed while copying many gigabytes of data. Within the first few minutes I knew what the speed felt like - it was pretty slow. Don't get me wrong - I knew I only had an 802.11g Mac but my transfer speed was only around 3.1 MB/sec, nothing like the almost 7 MB/sec which 54Mbps 802.11g should be capable of. Nevertheless I left it churning away and left it for an hour or two. However when I returned I found a dialog box saying the AirDisk had disconnected, and my file copy had been aborted.

Things went downhill from this point. Now nothing seemed to work. I couldn't re-mount the AirDisk even though I could see it with Airport Disk Utility. The AEN was behaving extremely erratically, disappearing from the Airport Utility panel before mysteriously reappearing some time later. I could reboot everything and the network would seem to work but the AirDisk was still not mountable. Then 10 minutes later the network would fall apart again. It was all quite annoying.

After much head-scratching, I eventually figured out that the network dropping out after a few minutes was the sort of thing that would happen if two devices on the same network are both acting as DHCP servers. Searching through the Internet panel of the AEN configuration screens I finally noticed a drop box to disable 'internet sharing' and activate 'bridge mode'. Bingo! This solved the dropped network issues, AND it turned the AEN light to a solid green.


But my AirDisk was still not working. At this point I began wondering if the drive had suffered some kind of catastrophic failure in its first day of use.

It eventually occurred to me to disconnect the AirDisk from the AEN and reconnect it to my laptop. The only reason I didn't do this earlier was the fact that I had only formatted the drive a couple of hours earlier! But once I connected the drive, lo and behold, nothing. It didn't show up in the Finder. I proceeded to check the drive with Disk Utility and immediately discovered the problem:

This 'invalid sibling link' could not be fixed by Disk Utility. I looked it up on Google but found precious little relevant information. Luckily the mighty DiskWarrior was up to the challenge and was able to fix the problem. One directory rebuild later, and the AirDisk was magically mounted on the Mac's desktop! I disconnected it from the Mac and plugged it back into the AEN via a USB hub. I remounted it wirelessly using Airport Disk Utility and everything now seems to be hunky-dory. Hopefully I'm not tempting fate by saying that. Watch this space.

The Printer
Getting the printer to work was pretty straightforward. Trying to print to my old printer profile resulted in a 'printer not found' error, but simply re-selecting my printer in the 'Bonjour' submenu of the print dialog box created a new working profile. I made that my default profile before deleting the old one. Job done. (Although my printer is a multifunction I don't expect scanning to work wirelessly and haven't bothered to test it).

Results
Well, I finally have the exact setup I was hoping for. My Airport Express is connected to the living room stereo and AirTunes works flawlessly. The Express is also sharing the ADSL signal. The AEN is upstairs connected to an unpowered USB hub which is in turn connected to my printer and the new hard drive. Everything is working, and I don't have any cables running through my walls! I'm very pleased. One thing I would mention to anyone contemplating this is that I took the opportunity to rearrange my iTunes library and copied 15GB of music to the AirDisk before adding it all to iTunes (iTunes was not set to copy files and not to keep the library organised). Since the files wouldn't be moved I figured that adding them to the library wouldn't take too long. Oh boy was I wrong about that - determining gapless playback over 802.11g for 15GB of music took around 14 hours! It all worked without dropping any connections though, so hopefully that's a good stress test of the AirDisk. One thing I have noticed is that the hard drive doesn't seem to spin down, and although it doesn't bother me this is something I would expect to be addressed by a firmware update. Some people claim that not spinning down reduces the life of the hard drive but - given that modern drives have a MTBF measured in hundreds of thousands of hours - I'm not one of them.

Despite complaining about the speed I should add that the system is still highly usable. iTunes plays over the 802.11g network just fine. Movies and music videos seem to play without problems. I am still experimenting with iPhoto but others have reported success. I've also copied a lot of stock photography to the AirDisk and despite a slight pause while the custom icons are displayed the responsiveness is excellent. I have also set up nightly scripts to backup important documents to a folder on the AirDisk. As a laptop user I find the convenience to be well worth the price of the hardware. Not to mention freeing up dozens of gigabytes on my already crammed laptop hard drive.

Conclusions
This is a great product with excellent benefits for us laptop-as-sole-computer types who don't want to be constantly connecting and disconnecting wires. Having said that however the actual product has a distinct 'version 1.0' feeling to it. I don't consider my single Airport Express network to be particularly unusual but adding the AEN to it was unreasonably difficult. Airport Utility's automatic configuration needs to be significantly improved for this device to be truly accessible to your average consumer. Nevertheless, I still love it

Roll your own .Mac

Whilst browsing through my newsreader today I noticed an article on Lifehacker about replicating .Mac services for free. Long-time readers will now that Apple's infamous bait-and-switch routine with .Mac really irritated me. So this is right up my street. The original article is at 5thirtyone, and is well worth reading. The box.net revelations were particularly interesting,

Preventing iPhoto albums from appearing in your screensavers preference pane

While searching for a solution to iPhoto polluting my screensavers list with hundreds of albums I found this thread over on the Apple discussion forums. Since those forum posts will expire after a few months I am posting gryphonent's solution here for my own records. if you do read through the thread, be sure to look out for the amusingly smarmy posts by the improbably-named Al Van Malsen.

To disable the iPhoto screen saver from showing your albums try this:

1.) Launch the Terminal application
2.) Type the following command (all on one line) and hit return
defaults delete com.apple.iApps iPhotoRecentDatabases ; chflags uchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

I have done this on my computer and have not noticed any ill effects from it. Essentially the command deletes the "iPhotoRecentDatabases" key from the "com.apple.iApps.plist" preference file and then locks the file so iPhoto can't write back to it the next time you launch iPhoto.

If you do experience any strange behavior after trying this you can unlock the "com.apple.iApps.plist" file in the Finder's "Get Info" window or you can issue the following command in the Terminal application:
chflags nouchg ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iApps.plist

Blocking a website with /etc/hosts in OS X

In an article on parental control of OS X, namely blocking children from accessing myspace.com, Dave Taylor proposes using the /etc/hosts file to accomplish the task. While experimenting with the method I found that I was unable to control the process, no matter what the contents of /etc/hosts.

After much trial and error I discovered that it is the lookupd process that needs to be restarted in order to respect changes to the /etc/hosts file. A reboot will accomplish the same thing, but twiddling my thumbs for several minutes through a shutdown and startup routine was not an acceptable solution.

In case anyone else has the same problem, here is the breakdown of this two-step process:

The default /etc/hosts file looks like this:

To block both http://myspace.com and http://www.myspace.com add a line such as 127.0.0.1 myspace.com www.myspace.com. Fire up Terminal.app and enter these commands:

Now you need to fire up Activity Monitor (Located in OS X's /Utilities folder) and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password.

Fire up a web browser and enter http://www.myspace.com. You should now find that the browser is redirected to the localhost at 127.0.0.1. This will be the contents of OS X's /Library/Webserver/Documents/ folder.

Reversing the procedure

First you need to remove the myspace line from /etc/hosts. Head back to Terminal and reissue the pico command you used earlier:

And delete the myspace line. Once again, hit ctrl-X, Y to save and exit.

You now need to again launch the Activity Monitor and force quit the process named lookupd. You will need to enter your administrator password again.

Open up a new web browser window and enter http://www.myspace.com. The browser should once again connect as usual.

FolderBlog on IIS

I've been using the great little image CMS known as FolderBlog for the last few months and have been thoroughly enjoying it. The program is easily adapted to any design and is incredibly simple to use, allowing even the most computer-illiterate client to easily upload images and edit captions. The official program doesn't have an easy non-FTP way to delete images, but that is taken care of by a nifty little modification by Björn-Frederic Limmer known as FolderBlog Ikue Reloaded (FIR). FIR also adds other features - including adding .gif compatibility and sorting by EXIF data - but it is the delete function that tops my list.

However, my entire experience of using FolderBlog and FIR has been on Apache servers. Today I tried to use it on an IIS server and ran into many problems. Searching for information to solve this problem was difficult, largely due to the lack of a search function at the official FolderBlog forums. The incomplete documentation for the current version 3 of the program also doesn't help! As a result I've decided to post my solution here:

Step 1
Edit fb_settings.php and replace:

With:

Note: To post new images and captions after changing this setting you need to browse to fb.php?p=post instead of fb.php/post/

Step 2
IIS does not have the REQUEST_URI function. We need to use PHP_SELF instead. Open up fb.php and replace all instances (there should be 5) of:

With:

Step 3
Some IIS servers which are running PHP as CGI may not have EXIF enabled. This was the case with my IIS server. In order to fix the exif_imagedata errors that result from this I had to find this section in the FIR version of fb.php:

And replace it with the same function from the original unmodified (not FIR) version of fb.php (this will remove EXIF functionality from FIR, but I don't need it anyway):

Step 4
Almost there! The FIR gallery now displays in my web browser, but although the thumbnails are visible none of links work. It turns out that all of the links were missing the ?q= characters. Thanks to this thread all you need to do to fix this is edit fb.php and replace this line:

With this line:

Step 5
There is no step 5. You should now have a working FolderBlog installation on a Windows IIS server.

Mail.app nightmare over

Back in April, I posted a rant about Mail.app's handling of inline images. The gist of my tirade was that Mail.app insisted (nothing's changed - it still does) on displaying images inline, rather than as attachments. The problem here is that messages with inline images or PDF documents take an age to open. This glacial response time is infinitely more aggravating when there are several such emails to open in succession (for instance when searching for one particular image out of dozens emailed to you). Mail.app does offer you the ability to right-click an image and choose 'display as icon', but close and re-open the email and you'll find that Mail.app will blithely continue to display the image as if you'd never told it otherwise. Even worse, there is no global preference to alter this behaviour.

This glaring tidbit of user-interface idiocy is particularly frustrating for me since I was a long-time Eudora user prior to the arrival of Mail.app and Eudora has always, for at least a decade, clearly distinguished between inline images and attachment images. Those of you who have never used any email client other than Mail.app may wonder what I am blithering on about. The basic explanation is that 'inline' should mean that the image is displayed along with the text of your email, whereas an 'attachment' should properly be an image (or other file) that is sent with the email as a file attachment but is not displayed with the text of your email.

The 'official' description of the difference between 'inline' and 'attachment' can be found in this RFC document, the relevant part of which is:

2.9 Content-Disposition and Multipart

If a Content-Disposition header is used on a multipart body part, it applies to the multipart as a whole, not the individual subparts. The disposition types of the subparts do not need to be consulted until the multipart itself is presented. When the multipart is displayed, then the dispositions of the subparts should be respected.

If the `inline' disposition is used, the multipart should be displayed as normal; however, an `attachment' subpart should require action from the user to display.

If the `attachment' disposition is used, presentation of the multipart should not proceed without explicit user action. Once the user has chosen to display the multipart, the individual subpart dispositions should be consulted to determine how to present the subparts.

Thus concludes Mac History 101.

"So", I hear you ask, "why are you moaning about this again?". Despair not dear reader - there is a solution! I have recently discovered that I am not alone in my Mail.app nightmare. Adam Nohejl of Czech outfit Loki Software must have been a fellow resident of inline-hell, but unlike yours truly he actually did something about it, writing a wonderful piece of $6 shareware named Mail Attachment Iconizer. This program does one thing only, and by God does it well. Simply fire up the installer and Mail Attachment Iconizer will modify your copy of Mail.app and forever turn those inline images into image icons. Double click 'em and they expand into images or PDFs; double-click a second time and they revert to icons. Apple - are you watching? This is the way it should have been done from the start.

For those of you wondering why I switched from Eudora in the first place if it was so damned wonderful, the answer is that Eudora at the time did not make the transition to OS X very well and wasn't updated for at least two years. It also didn't have Mail.app's tight integration with Address Book and the iLife apps. Not to mention the fact that Mail.app is free, whereas Eudora requires an annual (annual!) payment for the ad-free version.

Mac OS 7.5.5 running on a PSP

Neisha Erin Stadelhofer has managed to get Mac System 7.5.5 running on a PSP! It's still in its infancy, but very interesting nonetheless! Interesting tidbits: it takes 4 hours to boot; and she's only had her PSP for one day. In her own words - "yes, girls can hack too". Via MacSlash.

Video on your old iPod

Using the magic of iPodLinux you can now play videos on your third-generation (or earlier) iPod! These are the greyscale iPods, and there is not (yet) support for sound, but amazing stuff nonetheless!

OS X anti virus

Although there are famously no viruses on OS X other than artificial "proof-of-concept" examples, OS X Guide have posted a tutorial on how to use the open-source Clam anti-virus. Apparently the main reason is so that you don't inadvertently pass on Windows viruses. All very well-intentioned, but surely by the same rationale we should be scanning for OS 9, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux viruses...

Password assistant

I've used Keychain Access for quite a while now, both to store logins and passwords for websites and for personal information such as banking and identification details. So it was a bit of a surprise when I finally clicked that key-shaped button next to the password field: Pretty nifty, especially in this day and age when ordinary people have to come up with more and more non-trivial passwords.

Drastically reduce mailbox disk usage

Thanks to this hint on MacOSXHints today, I have just reduced my Mail.app mailbox from 860MB down to 460MB in about 10 seconds. Apparently this only applies if you imported your pre-Tiger mailbox. Still, this is the kind of hint I love

Home made laptop batteries

Roll your own for around half the price.

MT SpamLookup

Despite having recently checked Six Apart's plugin directory for Trackback management plugins, I somehow missed SpamLookup until I read a brief blog entry on it tonight. Installation is a case of simple drag and drop and everything seems to be working smoothly.

Smart mailbox tip

There's a great tip on MacOSXHints today describing how to implement IsNot checks so you can, for example, redirect all mail that isn't already in another mailbox.

Tiger and OS9 warning

Alice Wang over at Techie Geeky Mac Stuff reports on a serious problem with booting to OS9 on a Mac with Tiger installed. Presumably this only applies if you performed an upgrade install of Tiger. If like me you erased your hard disk and did a clean install then, well, no need to worry - you don't have OS9 on your drive anyway.

SCode reinstalled, GD issue solved

During the relocation of this site to Register1's hosting service an issue cropped up with James Seng's MT-Scode. The scodetest.cgi script was failing due to a missing GD.pm. Register1 were very helpful and had GD.pm installed within a couple of hours of my first email. However GD still refused to function - the SCode numbers weren't being drawn. From the http error log:

[Fri May 13 18:46:04 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] Premature end of script headers: mt-scode.cgi
[Fri May 13 18:46:04 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] /usr/bin/perl: relocation error: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/GD/GD.so: undefined symbol: gdFontGetGiant
[Fri May 13 18:54:38 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] gd-png: fatal libpng error: Invalid number of colors in palette
[Fri May 13 18:54:38 2005] [error] [client 81.151.xxx.xxx] gd-png error: setjmp returns error condition

After a dead end or two, Aaron & Isaac Goldberg provided the vital clue - it appeared to be a problem with the server's GD installation.

Despite just having spent a fair amount of time on my GD.pm problem, Register1 enthusiastically started investigating the new problem. They weren't running CPanel so the Goldbergs' cleangd advice didn't apply. Nevertheless Register1 solved the problem two days later without any further prompting, and the previously-broken SCode installation suddenly started working. They explained how they fixed it:

We had to downgrade the version of GD from 2.23 to 2.11 and use a pre-compiled Perl-GD rpm available from Redhat as opposed to a self-compiled version.

SCode was the one stumbling block to a complete migration to Register1's servers. With that solved, this site's old address is now officially defunct, and all traffic is being redirected to thoughton.co.uk/digitallife/

Comment
Register1's support has been nothing short of outstanding throughout this episode. Email replies were very quick - often within an hour. On one occasion, having just sent off a half-past-midnight email inquiry, a reply arrived at 1am! A great personal service - I've only been with them for a week but they are looking like the perfect hosts. Highly recommended, and very reasonably priced as well. They are also currently offering a "3 years for the price of 2" deal.

Tiger notes, vol. 2

Spotlight is still slow. Top tip of the day: don't make any spelling mistakes in your spotlight query.
Solution: possibly re-install QuickSilver and use it solely for launching apps.

Safari RSS no longer works with HSBC's online banking site. Safari didn't work at first too. That finally got fixed by the 1.2 update. Back to square one.
Solution: use FireFox.

DoubleCommand no longer loads.
Solution: Daring Fireball notes that Apple have added some of DoubleCommand's functionality, but alas not including the ability to remap a PowerBook's 'enter' key. The developer's says on his site that he is aware of the incompatibility, but is unsure when a patch will be available.

KeyChain Access has changed for the worse. It now takes several extra clicks to make clipboard copies of certain information.
Solution: none yet.

Not specifically Tiger related, but since my copy of iClock vanished after installing Tiger I took the opportunity to upgrade to iClock 2. However there is a major problem - this new version has an annoying iClockWarnings icon taking up valuable dock space
Solution: none yet. May try and revert to the old iClock.

Quartz Composer

Stumbled across an interesting blog entry on Quartz Composer today.

Update: Someone's already launched a dedicated site.

Tiger notes

My Tiger notes so far:

Spotlight is quite slow on my 667MHz G4. Using it to launch apps (granted, not it's primary function) is several times slower than with QuickSilver.

Dashboard is fast. Especially once you remove all animated Dashboard widgets since they hog so much CPU - the analog World Clock widget eats around 5-10% of my CPU, but the third-party Dash Monitors is by far the worst culprit (up to 40% CPU in full graphical mode).

Automator is fast (and awesome). My favorite workflow so far is Mail Images.

iPhoto was broken. Trashing plists and library did not fix it.
Solution: delete and reinstall.

iSync crashes upon launch. Trashed plists. Now launches but crashes as soon as I attempt to connect to the phone.
Solution: None yet.

Little Snitch was broken.
Solution: install new 1.2b3 version.

iClock had vanished.
Solution: downloaded and installed newest version.

Fire crashes on launch.
Solution: Apparently recompiling from source using XCode2 will fix this. I've switched to AdiumX.

MySQL acting strangely. After a reboot mysqld sometimes (but not every time) jumps to 100% CPU and gets stuck there.
Solution: force quitting mysqld and manually restarting in terminal fixes the problem (until your next reboot).

BitTorrent official client crashes on launch.
Solution: use Tomato Torrent Bits on Wheels (having to find a new BT app led me to discover Bits on Wheels. It's much more informative than both the original client and Tomato. Azureus provides similar information, but the obvious java-ness really grates on me).

Ecto behaves strangely. For instance Command-Shift-U used to insert a hyperlink of the clipboard contents. Now it sometimes does this, but at other times it does nothing.
Solution: Upgrade to new 2.3 version.

Upgrade to Tiger, PHP and MySQL broken

I quickly noticed after upgrading to OS X 10.4 that PHP includes were not executing and MySQL queries were once again producing the dreaded 'cannot connect' error message which 10.3.9 had introduced:

Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)

Fixing the broken PHP was easy. I simply installed Mark Liyange's PHP 5.0.4 package. Tiger ships with 4.3.10.

For the MySQL error, for reasons I have not yet looked into the previous solution (repairing the ownership of the /usr/local/mysql/data folder) did not fix the problem. And trying to load mysqld in the Terminal showed that it not have permission to access the /usr/local/mysql/data folder. Since changing its ownership to the 'mysql' user did not help, I tried changing to it my user account instead (in my case the command was sudo chown -R thoughton data/.) Bingo, that did the trick! Everything works again.

A word of caution, this is just a quick fix while learning the ins and outs of Tiger, I wouldn't be surprised if doing this has opened up some huge security hole - so do it at your own risk and always keep a backup.

Video-On-Demand using Mac Mini & VLC

Short but sweet.

MySQL broken by 10.3.9?

I noticed today that my MySQL install seemed to have broken. I was getting an error when I tried to post a new entry via Ecto, and after poking around a bit I discovered that any query involving the mysql database (such as a site search) produced the same error:

Further investigation seemed to indicate this was a permissions problem. The only thing I've installed recently has been the OS X 10.3.9 update, so I'm guessing it happened then. After much googling I found the fix.

Change directory to your mysql directory:

And enter this change ownership command:

And voila! Everything works again.

P800 as a photo viewer

What a coincidence! I've had this entry on the back burner for a few days, when this hint appeared today at MacOSXHints, describing how to view your iPhoto albums on your internet-enabled mobile phone. Essentially the hint is having iPhoto generate a web page which you then view on your mobile phone. Not what I've been doing, but the end result is similar.

P800 as an iPod photo?
Rather than try to view my iPhoto albums online I've loaded several albums onto my P800 phone. Since the whole point is to view them on the phone, we can dramatically reduce the size of the image. I've found that reducing them to the size of my phone screen (320x208 ) and saving them as JPEG quality 20 results in perfectly acceptable photos for casual phone viewing (see the example at the end of this entry). And the file size drops from 1MB+ down to 15-25K! Taking 20K to be the average, that's over 6000 photos on a 128MB memory card. My entire photo library is only around 2500 photos so I could carry the whole thing around with me and still only take up 50MB of my 128MB card. I've actually chosen to carry around an album of around 200 of my best photos which only takes up 4MB.

The Mechanics
I've been using Adobe's ImageReady to resize and save my photos. ImageReady comes with a ready-made droplet (Constrain, Make JPEG 30) which only needs minor adjustment to do what I want. I just changed the Constrain to 320 pixels in each dimension and changed the Make JPEG to quality 20 instead of 30. Batch processing my 200 photos took about 10 minutes. If you don't already have ImageReady the well-regarded shareware application GraphicConverter can do all this as well.

Once you have your mini images you just need to transfer them over to the phone. You can bluetooth them all (although saving each one to the correct location is a pain), or do what I did and use a USB memory card reader to copy them all in one fell swoop. (I can't recommend these readers enough, especially since they can be had for as little as £9).

The final ingredient is an image viewer on your phone. The P800 comes with an image viewer (creatively titled Pictures), but it is a pile of crap pretty mediocre (it used to be a pile of crap that couldn't even display full screen images, but that got fixed in a firmware update). The interface is the main drawback, it requires several steps to display full screen images and cannot rotate images (which means you should rotate landscape photos prior to resizing). If that annoys you like it did me, I'd suggest using Resco Photo Viewer for UIQ, a more full-featured replacement. For non P800 users, Resco make this software for virtually every mobile platform there is.

And that's it! My P800 is now a fun little photo viewer I can bore friends and family with!

Comment
What are the pros and cons of each method?

Firstly it should be mentioned that contrary to first impressions, the MacOSXHints method doesn't provide 'live' updating of the photos, so new changes to the iPhoto album will only be available to the phone user when someone sitting at the Mac re-exports the album. That's still better than no updating at all, which is what happens with my method

Secondly the MacOSXHints method will give you the ability to scroll around a large version of the photo (provided your phone browser supports side scrolling) while my method only shows the photo at my phone's screen resolution. Luckily for me my phone has a large screen - the image to the right is a photo resized to fit my phone shown at actual size (the photo is a 320x220 JPEG quality 20, and is 12KB in size). Meet Pilipus from the island of Siberut

Mail.app inline image annoyance

I've noticed for a while that Mail.app seems to insist on displaying image attachments inline. This is fine for small web-optimised images, but becomes intensely annoying when you are trying to read several emails in succession, all of which have one or more large (1MB+) image attachments, because Mail takes several seconds to open each email due to the huge image that it insists on displaying inline.

I had always intended to figure out a solution, but today when I actually sat down and looked for one, I had nasty surprise. There is no solution. Apple really needs to sort this out, it's enough to make me consider ditching Mail.app.

Build your own Salling Clicker

The Unofficial Apple Weblog commented on a very interesting MacDevCenter article today detailing how to control iTunes from an internet-enabled mobile phone via a WAP browser and OS X's built-in Apache webserver. Great stuff, but hang on a minute ...

If you already own the incredible Salling Clicker, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about. With Clicker you can already do everything described in the article without typing a single line of code. Furthermore you can view album art and playlists on the phone, which really has to be seen to be appreciated. And to top it all off it's not only iTunes - Clicker also has controls for iPhoto, DVD Player, Keynote and PowerPoint, as well as numerous third party plugins (admittedly of varying quality).

Given the all-round awesomeness of Clicker, it was the ability to script apps other than iTunes that really intrigued me about the MacDevCenter article. One such use I will be looking into is toggling P800 Manager's internet sharing. Since Clicker can activate the BlueTooth connection from the phone, this would eliminate the need to physically visit your Mac to start P800 Manager's internet sharing. It may be that P800 Manager is not scriptable, in which case I'll be looking into applescripts which enable internet sharing over bluetooth.

Back to the MacDevCenter article, the use of a web interface was also interesting - on the plus side it is not range-limited like the BlueTooth-based Clicker is, but on the down side internet access on a phone costs money (quite a lot in most cases). I suppose if you have an unusually large home the web interface may be the best option, but I for one cannot imagine any other need for the greater range.

One free alternative that comes to mind is sharing your Mac's internet via BlueTooth to access the web from your phone, all in order to surf to your Mac's webserver and control iTunes. How's that for convoluted? But we're now back to limited BlueTooth range, which kind of defeats the purpose. I think I'll be sticking with Salling Clicker, at least for iTunes control.

Internet sharing success

Despite previous failed attempts to get this working I did not lose hope. Since the recent firmware upgrade hadn't done anything significant to solve the problem, I concluded that it must be the generic bluetooth dongle I had. I decided to do what I should have done to start with, and bought a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle. This has cracked it!

The combination of the new firmware and the new dongle allows P800 Manager to share my internet connection for what appears to be an indefinite duration! So far my P800 has been sharing my laptop's internet for about 6 hours straight without any problems.

The mobile Opera browser is, as you can see, pretty slick. It resizes images very nicely and the 'fit-to-width' option saves you from a lot of side scrolling. Furthermore the full-screen option (as shown to the right) allows you to make maximum use of your screen real estate.

P800 syncing, solved

After the failure of my recent P800 firmware upgrade to solve certain long-standing problems, I finally splurged and replaced my el-cheapo generic bluetooth dongle with a D-Link DBT-120 bluetooth dongle, which is incidentally the dongle that Apple recommends. This has completely and utterly solved my often mentioned syncing problems. Syncing works 100% of the time now! All Apple needed to do was to put a warning on their website - something along the lines of "using other brand bluetooth dongles may cause iSync to crap out" would have sufficed.

DragonBurn does something useful

If you've ever inserted a blank CD-R or DVD-R, you'll know that OS X has a built-in disc burning ability. It also comes bundled with the Disk Utility application for, among other things, burning disk images. Despite this, Roxio's Toast 6 is still generally considered as one of the "must buy" apps due to it's much more extensive support of various CD and VCD formats, not to mention dual-layer DVD support. Given these facts, I've always wondered what it was about DragonBurn that made it worth US$50. It appears that this is one of the reasons.

iPhoto 5, hero and zero

My copy of iLife '05 has arrived! The app I was looking forward to most was iPhoto 5, in particular the long-awaited addition of folders to help you organise your albums. However there are apparently numerous problems: MacOSXHints, MacInTouch, Accelerate Your Mac, and MaxFixIt have all had reports. The MacOSXHints article in particular specifically concerns a problem with folders. This problem did not affect me for some reason - although MacOSXHints has included a solution if it does start to occur.

My own experiences so far have been generally good, with the one glaring exception of exporting photo galleries for the web. Don't get me wrong, iPhoto's web export works pretty much as it always has (pretty well, but not great), but neither of my preferred web-export plugins, BetterHTMLExport and PhotoToWeb, work with iPhoto 5. They look like they're working, but no images get exported. BetterHTMLExport's webpage states that the developer is aware of the problem.

Also a concern is that iPhoto 5 seems to be noticeably slower than iPhoto 4. In particular opening images used to be instantaneous. Now you have to sit and wait while iPhoto displays your selected thumbnail for a second or two in the centre of a large empty black box before the full-size image fills the window. I've also heard that it is almost useless on a Mac with a G3 processor - most of the editing functions do not work and navigation is painfully slow.

26/1/05 - Update: At some point in the last few hours BetterHTMLExport was updated to version 2.1 and is now compatible with iPhoto 5!

27/1/05 - Further update: Ack! I just noticed that Keyword Assistant has vanished! I refuse to even attempt to assign keywords without this wonderful piece of software. Luckily it appears that there is an iPhoto 5 version going through beta-testing right now.

PCM to MPEG1 to AIFF to AC3

I recently encountered an unusual AVI video file, containing MSMPEG4 video and PCM audio. My favorite DVD (ffmpeg) preset in ffmpegX refused to process the file. I knew from previous experience that the DVD (ffmpeg) preset could handle MSMPEG4 video, so I surmised it was the PCM audio that was fouling things up.

Slower workaround
I worked around the problem by using the DVD (mpeg2enc) preset with 'Decode with mplayer' selected. After a slow encode (probably twice as long as ffmpeg) I ended up with an .mpv video file and another file. This second file had a truncated name, according to the settings it should have been some sort of AC3, but the mpeg2enc engine had produced a file without a suffix.

Not actually an AC3 at all
The first thing I did was drop the mystery file onto ffmpegX for identification but, unusually for ffmpegX, nothing was revealed. I then tried adding an .ac3 suffix only to have A.Pack reject the file. Soldiering on, I changed it to .mp2 and tried to open it in QuickTime Player. Still no go . Finally I tried an .mpa suffix. Bingo! Hitting command-J showed that QuickTime identified the file as an MPEG1 audio file. Unfortunately my good mood was short-lived. I was unable to export it from QuickTime - the only options were movie formats.

MPEG1?
After resorting to Google I was reminded that iTunes can play MPEG1 audio files. The first thing I did was change the iTunes import preferences to 'AIFF encoder'. However iTunes then refused to let me drag my .mpa file into the music library unless I changed the suffix to .mp2. Once I had done that I used iTunes to convert the audio file to AIFF (by option-clicking the Advanced menu and choosing 'convert to AIFF').

The Finish Line
Once I had my AIFF, I was able to drop it into A.Pack, select my two channels, and convert it into a two channel AC3 file. From there it was just a matter of using the .mpv video file and .ac3 audio file in Sizzle to author a DVD, and using Toast to burn it.

Conclusions
The Mac used to boast a system where, no matter what you changed the name of a file to, double clicking it would always open the correct application. We used to brag about this to PC users. Why am I now, fifteen years later, messing around changing file extensions?

Uncripple your G5 superdrive

Macbidouille are reporting that most G5s shipping today are equipped with an artificially crippled DVD burner. By removing the drive and installing in a PC, they were able to flash the firmware and upgrade it from a ordinary 8x DVD-R burner to a dual-layer 16x DVD-R burner! Re-install it in the Mac and use Patchburn to enable it in the iApps.

Automatically copy Bluetoothed images into iPhoto

While searching for some iPhoto information, I found this interesting tutorial on how to set up folder actions to automatically copy images into iPhoto after they've been bluetoothed to your Mac.

Stop iphoto from importing images

After spending more time using my new Dimage X50, the major annoyance is rapidly becoming iPhoto launching itself and glacially preparing to import images every time I connect the camera. After a fruitless visit to iPhoto's preference window, I resorted to Google and found this. The option to launch iPhoto when you connect a camera is controlled in the preferences of the Image Capture application. Obviously.

Googlescript Searches

I read a useful Google hack recently - the following link opens a Javascript window:

Javascript:void(q=prompt('Type%20in%20the%20search%20term:')); if(q)void(location.href='http://www.google.com/search?q='+escape(q))

Click the link and type in your search term. When you click 'OK' it takes you to the Google results page for your search term. What's that you say? Not very inspiring so far? Well, how about this -

Using just a little knowledge of the way Google searches you can search web directories:

Javascript:void(q=prompt('Type%20in%20the%20type%20of%20file%20here:')); if(q)void(location.href='http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&num=100&q=intitle%3A%22index%20of%20/%22%20%22'+escape(q)+'%22')

Or you can specify a particular file type (in this case I've used .mp3, you can replace it with .ogg or .avi or whatever takes your fancy ):

Javascript:void(q=prompt('Type%20the%20name%20of%20the%20MP3:')); if(q)void(location.href='http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&num=100&q=intitle%3A%22index%20of%20/%22%20%22'+escape(q)+'%22%20mp3')

Of course, despite the title of this post, this tip isn't restricted to Google - my favorite use of this technique is the search term below which I cobbled together to enable me to quickly search this blog:

Javascript:void(q=prompt('Search%20Digital%20Life%20the%20OS%20X%20way:')); if(q)void(location.href='http://thoughton.co.uk/cgi-bin//mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search='+escape(q))

Note that there should be no spaces in the above code snippets.

One great use of this method is to place a button in your Bookmarks bar:

PB CallerID

I tried out BluePhoneElite today and to my surprise it works with my original firmware P800! The manual even mentions the P800, saying that although you can initiate calls from the Mac - which will also have on-screen caller-ID - and have 'answer the phone' and 'ignore' options when the P800 rings, the SMS funcions will not work due to a firmware bug with all Series 60 and UIQ phones. A pity - something I would find very useful would be SMS composing on the Mac.

BluePhoneElite also has a slick proximity function. I particularly like the option to set your iChat status:

Sizzle not Sizzling

I encountered this oddity in Sizzle 0.1 today. After launching the app I found that the 'Add Chapter' button was greyed out. After quite a lot of head scratching and poking around Sizzle, I finally discovered that it was caused by having the 'Use Custom Chapter Times' checkbox selected under the 'Other' tab (from a previous authoring session) without having a chapter selected in the 'Chapters' tab.

Smilies in Movable Type

Using Brad Choate's MTMacro plugin I've enabled smilies on this site

All I did was install the plugin as per the instructions, and then put a bunch of smilies inside a smilies folder (inside my icons folder).

Then I inserted this code into the head of each template (and repeated it with modifications for each different smiley):

<MTMacroDefine name="smiley1" string=" ">
<img src="<$MTBlogURL$>icons/smilies/biggrin.gif"
alt=" " />
</MTMacroDefine>

iTunes 'Album Artwork Not Modifiable'

I encountered this message displayed in the album art window of iTunes today. After some googling I found that it might be the result of trying to add album art to songs on ejected disks, or songs on a CD, but neither applied to me. After some investigation I discovered it was because that particular album was in the ogg format!

Forward Delete on a Powerbook

Back when I first got this PowerBook (667MHz DVI Titanium), it took me a few months to figure this out. You can forward delete by pressing function-delete. A dedicated key would still have been nice...

Airport disconnecting when switching users

Since getting the Airport Express and going wireless, I've noticed that I get disconnected from the Airport network when I use Fast User Switching to switch over to my iTunes user (I used this MacOSXHints hint to set up a large second shared iTunes library on an external hard disk). After a bit of research I came across this mailing list post. Switching to my iTunes user showed that I could not make any changes to the Network settings. This was when I remembered that I had set the iTunes user to Simple Finder to see what was so simple about it. Switching back to my main user showed that I couldn't make changes to logged in users, so after a quick switch back and logout of the iTunes user, I set it to Full Finder, logged back in, opened up the Airport tab of Network preferences and entered the appropriate network name and password. Note: the password box only appears once you've chosen a network. Voila! No more disconnects when switching users.

tintin++ 1.93.5

Igor asked me to compile his latest version today - I had a look at my previous write-up on the process, but I needn't have worried - it installed without a hitch.

Running Apache behind an Airport Express

In order to reduce the number of wires I have to connect to my laptop I recently picked up an Airport Express. Setting it up to stream iTunes music to the stereo and print wirelessly to a USB printer were relatively painless, so I had high hopes for the device's third function - acting as a wireless internet router. However since the Airport Express only accepts ethernet network connections (the USB port is solely for printers), I needed to replace the free USB ADSL modem that comes with the BT Broadband service with a 'proper' ethernet ADSL modem. Based on nothing more than a solitary post by one guy reporting success with it in conjunction with an Airport Express (on some forgotten discussion forum otherwise I'd link it) I ordered the D-Link DSL-300T modem.

Easy setup
Once the modem arrived I simply attached it to BT's ADSL microfilter using the supplied RJ-45 cable and to the Airport Express unit using the supplied ethernet cable. The modem's lights flashed a few times and the Airport Express's light went green. Apparently the Airport Express's primary function is the internet connection, because the light will flash an angry orange forever unless the unit is connected to the internet, even if you only bought it to stream music and print wirelessly. Once it was hooked up the Airport Express Setup program launched itself and led me through the extremely simple setup process. As soon as that was done I fired up Safari and to my delight I had wireless internet access.

Teething problems
However, as is so often the case, spending a short while exploring my new capabilities quickly showed one major flaw. I could not access this website! After some research it began to make sense. What used to be 'my' IP address was now the Airport Express's IP address, while the Airport Express was using DHCP to distribute private IPs to the client computer (my mac). After doing some research an Apple KnowledgeBase article entitled AirPort 4.0 Help: Can I use a web server on my network? finally shed some light on the subject. Since I don't have a static IP the first solution was ruled out, but the article contains a reference to achieving the same result by using what Apple calls port mapping (and what the rest of the world calls port forwarding).

This should work
I then found another Apple KnowledgeBase article AirPort 4.0 Help: Assigning IP addresses to devices on your AirPort network. This seemed to address my exact problem, so I fired up the Airport Admin Utility, chose to configure the Airport Express, and clicked on the Port Mapping tab. Here I mapped public port 80 to the private IP 10.0.1.201 port 80. I then opened the System preferences Network panel where I modified the Airport connection's TCP/IP settings to 'Manual' IPv4 configuration, IP Address 10.0.1.201, subnet mask 255.255.255.0, router 10.0.1.1, and the appropriate DNS servers for my ISP. None of this is very complicated, and it SHOULD work. But it didn't. I could still access the internet, but I couldn't access this website.

The clouds part?
After more research, and browsing through assorted forums, I finally discovered this post in the MacOSXHints forums. This looked like a working solution! Not only did the poster have the exact same modem as me, he was trying to do the same thing!

Maybe not
However, there's still something wrong. It took me a few minutes to figure where in the modem's web-based configuration controls I could set the modem to act as a bridge, but once I had it set I set the Airport Express to log in using PPPoE. Apparently if I can get the Airport Express to login then port mapping will work. However when I fire it all up I get an endless 'Looking for PPPoE hosts' message scrolling in the menubar! Annoying.

Temporary solution
While I think about it (never admit defeat!) I've switched to using the 'Enable Default Host' option in the Base Station Options (located under the Airport tab in the configuration page of Airport Admin Utility). By setting the empty field to 201 (so the IP address is 10.0.1.201) you are limited to only having one Mac accessible from the internet, but that's what I had with the old non-wireless connection anyway. It simply would have been nice to get the port mapping to work in the event of any further computers being added to the network.

Installing MT-Captcha (aka SCode)

This site has recently started to attract spammers, extolling the virtues of viagra, cialis, and large penises in general. Since the Movable Type interface is relatively slow, deleting these spams has become a bit of a pain.

There are several methods of defence, ranging from simply removing the 'post message' button and forcing everyone to preview, to installing Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist, or a script which disables comments after a set period of time. Elise Bauer of the Learning Movable Type blog has an extensive description of the various approaches.

The best solution for minimal admin-interaction (i.e. the best solution for lazy folks like yours truly) appears to be James Seng's MT-Captcha, an MT plugin which adds a graphical security code which the commenter has to read and type in (thus defeating the automated spam bots). Apparently captcha stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart."

Fink hell
Unfortunately, in order to draw the images, MT-Captcha requires that you install the perl module gd. I had previously downloaded and attempted to install this using these instructions but got lost in a maze of dependencies and fink hell. However today I stumbled across a promisingly-titled document How To Install gd version 1.8.4 on Mac OSX on DarwinPorts!

However, this meant I