Twitter has invaded

We’ve had a few ephoxians on twitter for a while, but early last week we hit some kind of tipping point and now most of the engineers are actively chatting on it. For my part I joined to follow and converse with Brent’s Dev Diary, it’s a cool idea and I might do a bit of dev diary tweeting myself one day. All of a sudden though the team is tweeting about all sorts of things

I’m still exploring how I want to use this and who I want to follow, so far it’s just a few friends and some well known new media celebrities (who are, as always, responsive to fans no matter how they want to communicate)

I don’t think we’re going to get too many more succumbing to the fun so if anyone is interested here’s the list:

http://twitter.com/_spyder
http://twitter.com/aussiestompy
http://twitter.com/ajsutton
http://twitter.com/rojotek
http://twitter.com/sunethmendis
http://twitter.com/southda
http://twitter.com/HamstaaVFerret
http://twitter.com/andrew_roberts

I’m sure if there are people I’ve missed they’ll be pointed out to me shortly and I’ll probably update this post.

 

And the prize for most used jailbreak feature goes to…

Status Notifier. I knew that I would miss the status bar icon for new mail, but I had forgotten how stupid the silent mode toggle is. The icon for it is so natural that I forgotten it was a jailbreak-only feature! That apple still haven’t added an icon for this after three years is amazing to me.

Yes you can look at (or feel) the side of the phone to check – but the problem is I regularly forget that I have silent mode on and just stick it in my pocket without a second thought. I have missed a number of phone calls and countless SMS due to accidental silent mode. It’s ridiculous.

 

CalDAV beats exchange by providing the basics

Google’s exchange calendaring support for the iPhone always felt like a hack, and having tried syncing to a real exchange server I knew it was the fault of the protocol. I was excited at first to get push calendaring but the benefits just didn’t seem worth the hassles I had to put up with. And I’m very glad I decided not to try contact sync.

A bit of background: before exchange sync was available I was using plaxo to sync between my mac and google and then iTunes sync to the phone. This is important, because I knew exactly what the phone was capable of (in short, it’s very similar to iCal just with a limited set of recurring time periods). I switched to get over-the-air calendaring, but it hasn’t been pretty.

Beyond a few early problems with updating, the limitations of the exchange protocol bugged me constantly. It doesn’t support multiple alarms on one event and a few of my events wound up with a weird identifier string invited to them. The worst part though is it can’t move events between calendars; I often forget to change the calendar when creating events and pre-exchange it was an easy fix. With exchange sync, I had to delete and recreate the event when that happened.

All of that is fixed now that I’m using the caldav support added in OS 3.0. I can create multiple alarms again, after a few edits i’ve fixed up the weird events created under exchange protocol that the iPhone thought I didn’t own, and tonight when I set a calendar reminder on my mac to delay for 30 minutes I got a nice surprise when the re-reminder dinged on my phone as well. This is finally as good as direct phone syncing, and doing it over the air for instant updates isn’t costing me a MobileMe subscription.

I didn’t mention it at the time but the news of CalDAV support was my main reason for happily un-jailbreaking the phone. CalDAV worked so well with iCal that I had a feeling it would be awesome on the iPhone. And it is.

 

The internet, bringer of wonderful things

There’s been a lot of details circulating about how to enable tethering in OS 3.0 when carriers don’t want you to. I got it working with a hacked carried bundle, but I just reverted to the default after I found this:

Enable iPhone Tethering

Who needs to enable iTunes debugging options when you can hit a webpage in safari on the phone, hit download and instantly enable tethering

 

Searching to load apps has always seemed weird to me

Spotlight is coming to the iPhone. That sounds great on the surface, but I don’t think it’ll be quite as awesome for me as Apple are making out. I find search to be useful in OS X when I know exactly which app I want to load, but particularly on my iPhone that’s very rarely the case.

Maybe I just have too many toys / games to choose from but when I want to waste time with my phone I never have a specific app in mind; I spend 30 seconds browsing through the pages for something that I feel like playing. That breaks down with more than 2 pages but search won’t help at all.

 
Who knows, maybe I’ll just stop wasting so much time on my phone, and spotlight will become useful because I’ll know what I want to load every time.

But I doubt it

 

Slowly weaning myself off the jailbreak

I didn’t get around to posting it here but the features in iPhone OS 3.0 are totally worth ditching my jailbreak for. There are a lot of nice little things that I’ll miss, but nothing particularly critical.

With the update due out this week, I’ve been slowly removing my jailbreak apps. First to go was categories; while subfolders was kind of nice they were a little slow to load so I wound up just never using any of the apps in them. Whatever I’ve lost in compactness of app pages I’ll make up for in the new spotlight search.

To help this, I’ve removed a bunch of apps and games I didn’t need, and used iBlank when removing categories to force the games onto page 4 leaving blank space at the bottom of pages 2 and 3. The lack of clutter actually makes things easier to find, despite the extra page swiping necessary.

At the same time I uninstalled stack. It served a similar purpose to categories, but I only regularly used one (maybe two) of the apps. Again, spotlight will pretty easily replace what I was using this app for.

From there, the only serious apps left are SBSettings and my theme. I’m really going to miss my wood shelves background and fancy round icons, the defaults are so boring. However between the lack of background tasks running and the usual optimisation that apple put into their new OS releases, it’s going to feel like a brand new phone!
(not as fast as the 3G S obviously, but still an improvement).

 
Once jailbreak is available for 3.0 – and given the 3.0-only updates I’ve seen to jailbreak apps it can’t be far away – I’ll probably do it again. The default settings app is just useless compared to SBSettings, and theming gives me a nicely personalised phone when everyone else can only customise their lock screen picture.

I don’t think I’ll install anything else beyond that though. Even if things like background scrobbling of tracks can’t be done in OS 3.0 without the background jailbreak daemon, who really cares when 99% of what I listen to on the phone is podcasts

 

Bootable backups always pay off eventually

I’ve been wondering, on and off for the last few months, why I persisted in nightly SuperDuper! backups in addition to Time Machine. Well now I know

In the middle of my last post I mentioned that I may have just screwed my USB ports. I had. This is a real problem when USB is the only input device – even my bluetooth keyboard wasn’t working! Thankfully I have just booted from the SuperDuper backup and am trying to restore all of the kext in the system folder, according to the package list that’s what the installer changed.

Even if this doesn’t work though, and I have to restore from backup, I at least have something I was able to use instead of being left with a brick requiring 2-3hrs of system restoration. Note to self though: when booting from the SuperDuper backup, don’t leave the Time Machine drive plugged in. TM just tried to do a backup which really wouldn’t end well

I knew it was a good idea to keep these bootable backups going, I’d just forgotten why. As annoying as this will be it’s good to remind yourself now and then what the value of multiple backup strategies is. Even if it results in being so worried you’re up until 1am trying to fix it.

 

Enabling 5.1 surround sound in OS X

Close to 18 months ago, when I first started seriously using that old mac laptop, I decided I needed a way to easily transfer my speakers between the desktop games machine and my mac that I used for everything else. One of my mates at work had an Audigy 2 NX, and after borrowing it for a day to make sure it worked on macs I decided to get one. It wasn’t until I had it that I realised the mac was only giving me 2 channels instead of 5.1

I shrugged and chalked this up to the built-in mac drivers, it was fine under windows with the official creative drivers.

And so it was that when I upgraded to the mac mini, and again with this second mini, that I was stuck with a sound card that wasn’t giving me surround. Most of the time this doesn’t concern me as I usually only listen to stereo sources, but I’d never even considered that it might work (the few references I could find to this device on the net were it only working in stereo on the mac).

Until tonight.

While doing some research for a friend who was interested in USB sound cards, I saw a product review stating that the Zalman USB card does work on macs in full 5.1 surround mode. This piqued my interest so I went searching and stumbled on a list of working sound cards forum post. Right there at the top is the Zalman card, but hang on, what’s that sitting at the bottom under supported 7.1 cards? Why it’s my damn Audigy 2 NX! WTF!

I immediately (and stupidly) installed the package attached to that post, but thankfully I read a bit further down the post before rebooting and realised I didn’t need to. This was a good idea because the package is from 10.4 somewhere and I would almost certainly have been left trying to do a restore from backup. I’ve reverted the kext files that the package installed, hopefully my mac doesn’t die when I reboot it after posting this.

In any case, the answer is Audio MIDI Setup! A program that had always sat in the Utilities folder looking summarily useless but turns out to be the hidden gem that Apple really needs to make more obvious. For those who will no doubt arrive here from google one day, here’s how to enable 5.1 surround sound on a USB sound card:

1. Select your sound card under the Properties For: dropdown
2. Select the number of channels under the audio output format
3. Click Configure Speakers
4. Select Multichannel
5. Select the correct number of speakers from the dropdown (only the valid one should be enabled)
6. You can now assign channels to each speaker, I’m pretty sure the numbers I used are correct although 3/4 and 5/6 might be in the wrong order

Here’s a couple of screenshots with number highlights to make it clear:

Maybe it’s just this sound card, but that’s a ridiculous requirement to get 5.1 surround sound working (and I haven’t actually tested if DVDs will play correctly, only some 6 channel test wavs I found). Wish me luck!

On the plus side, if this does work I will no longer have to worry about surround sound output from my media centre when I buy proper home theatre speakers (the audigy has optical and spdif out). I had been concerned that I would be stuck with stereo output from my Mac forever!

 

And now for something completely different

It’s a post! omg!

I don’t have a reason for suddenly stopping, I was just keeping myself busy tinkering with computers and it never occurred to me that I should be keeping the blog alive. I even forgot about my “minimum once a month” rule that was designed to stop this from happening

I’ve had lots to keep me occupied – once I confirmed the new mac mini was able to play the occasional game, I had to turn my old desktop machine into the new incarnation of rei and then migrate my MythTV backend to it, the old Mac Mini into a media centre front end and various other fun things along the way. The backend has been working for a while but the frontend still needs a bit of tweaking (don’t they always).

Hasn’t helped that both of my flatmates are vocal about how the old simple interface was better. Problem is, I don’t want a computer that plays video hooked up to the TV. I want a media centre, and now I have it but the remote control is a bit tricky to get right. Remote Buddy will probably help me with that but doing everything I want looks like a lot of pain to set up. Good thing it has a 30 day trial I guess

I’ll probably dredge up some of my MythTV migration experiences and post about that. We’ll see.

 

Just in case anyone decides to try this

OS X Migration Assistant via network cable sucks. Even if it’s gigabit.

The new mini has arrived, and I decided to see if gigabit would be faster than my USB 5200rpm Time Machine drive for restoring a 40gb profile via the Migration Assistant. It was slooooow. I didn’t want to waste time setting up Time Machine, and I misread the free space on it, so after all that migration fun with the new backup drives I just said “bugger it” and wiped the Time Machine drive. The new initial backup is taking forever, so to be honest the network migration probably wound up around the same speed as direct TM restore would’ve been.

I know, I know… wiping backups is insane and stupid. I still have the second drive offsite with the old backups on it, but really I don’t think I care about historical backups that much. Just the protection of data. I might use the second drive as an experiment, see how TM handles backing up a new system with the same computer name (if it dies I’ll just wipe that one too).

 
On a lighter note, the new mini is suitably fast in the graphics department. I was totally delusional thinking it was anywhere near the speed of my desktop card (ATI x1950) but for the games I’ve been playing recently it seems fine. After looking at benchmarks, I certainly wasn’t expecting to play City of Heroes in full 1920×1200 resolution so that was a nice surprise

Now, on to formatting the old mini as a clean TV machine