What Happened to Logitech?

Computers / By / / / 4 minutes of reading

I’ve had several Logitech keyboard/covers for my iPads over the years. In December, while traveling, I dropped my keyboard (and thankfully NOT the iPad) which bent the corner so that it no longer sits flat. When we got home from our trip, I ordered a replacement, the newer Ultrathin Magnetic Keyboard Cover for the iPad Air from Amazon.com. I was frustrated with myself that I had dropped the old one, but was excited about getting the new one, as it is thinner and lighter, and has an adjustable angle for the iPad’s screen. It arrived a few days later, and I plugged it in to charge it, then got it synched with my iPad Air. I began to notice problems almost immediately, as the keyboard would fall asleep when idle, but then not wake up when you pressed a key. I had to turn off the keyboard, and then back on again in order to get it to reconnect… About every 5 minutes! Then, as I continued to try using it, I discovered that the screen would flash as the keyboard would send the signal to capture a screenshot periodically. One night, it took 57 screenshots as I tried to log in after turning the keyboard off and on, typing email, or trying to type a journal entry into DayOne… Now every time I sync, I have to open Photos and delete all of the extraneous screenshots that the keyboard has taken. I ordered the keyboard through Amazon before we […]

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Upgrading an Older Macintosh with an SSD Replacement

Computers, Macintosh / By / / , / 6 minutes of reading

Let me start with a little background — I have been an avid Macintosh user since the original Macintosh (128K) was introduced in 1984, when I was in college. Yes, they can be expensive, but they are easier to use, which makes them more powerful, and I find that they have a longer useful lifespan then many other platforms. Over the years, I have kept many of my Macintoshes for over 5 years, keeping them relevant by adding memory and disk space over time, and of course keeping the operating system upgraded to the current version. My strategy has often been to purchase a new machine just as it is discontinued, when it’s very close to the current model but with a decent discount. My current Mac is an early-2011 MacBook Pro 17″ that I bought in November 2011, when it was replaced by the late-2011 version, identical except for a modest bump in processor clock rate (2.2 vs 2.3GHz). I saved several hundred dollars by buying the earlier model. After four years of faithful service, though, it was beginning to feel like an antique. Most of the OS X operating system updates actually improve the overall performance of the system, but it seemed like my old MBP just kept getting slower and slower. Exacerbating the problem is that my iTunes library has grown to over 500Gb, with music ripped in Apple-lossless (ALAC) format, high-definition movies, loads of books and apps, etc. It just wasn’t practical to keep all of that on

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Moved to MacHighway

Computers, Hosting, Websites / By / / / 2 minutes of reading

As I noted in December, my former web hosting service, GoDaddy, announced in December that they were going to revoke access to us the Mailman mailing list manager that is included by default in their Linux cPanel hosting accounts. I use Mailman for my personal use, as well as to manage several discussion lists for the MacinTech Macintosh Users’ Group. GoDaddy claimed that it was due to spammers misusing the service, but I don’t really believe that for a second… First, I’ve gotten more spam while being hosting by GoDaddy than any other service that I have ever used, so I have a hard time believing that they take any actions to prevent spam! They also began advertising their own bulk email service just days after the announcement that they were turning off Mailman, which I can’t believe is a coincidence. I had moved my web sites to GoDaddy out of convenience when I was no longer able to host them myself after CenturyLink botched a DSL upgrade, leaving me offline for several weeks. In any event, in early January, I signed up with local Denver-based web hosting service MacHighway. There package is actually less expensive than GoDaddy. It’s also a bonus that they cater specifically to Macintosh users, so their instructions don’t reference Windows for everything, although they seem fairly platform-nuetral overall. So far, I am very pleased with MacHighway. The setup was easy. I have had to put in a couple of support tickets for things like requesting shell access, which is probably not

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GoDaddy Shutting Off MailMan, so I’m Shutting Off GoDaddy

Computers, Hosting / By / / , / 2 minutes of reading

This afternoon, I received this email from GoDaddy.com, my web hosting service: Important information about your hosting account Due to spammers abusing MailMan – a cPanel feature that lets you send bulk emails – we’re removing the feature on January 23, 2016 If you want to send bulk emails to your customers or clients we recommend checking out GoDaddy Email Marketing. Not only does this program let you email customers, it also includes more powerful features than MailMan, like opt-out management. If you have questions or need assistance, contact our Support Team at (480) 505-8877. Mailman is one of the services that I rely on for personal use, as well as for the web site and mailing list that I operate on behalf of MacinTech, a non-profit Macintosh User’s Group here in the Denver area. I’ve just spent a half-hour on the phone with goDaddy, and there is no exception to their decision to remove Mailman from the service that I’ve already paid for in advance. Their proposed solution is to pay them twice as much as I do now to add their email marketing program! There are other hosting providers, like MacHighway, that offer hosting packages for LESS than GoDaddy, which include a mailing list manager, Dada Mail, which is similar to Mailman. So, after many years at GoDaddy, I’ll be canceling my service and domain registrations with them in January, and moving to MacHighway.

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Audiophile Headphones and High-Resolution Audio

Audio, Entertainment, Music / By / / , , , , / 8 minutes of reading

After we got the Bose Quiet Comfort 20i noise-canceling earbuds for Jeannette, I decided to sit down and compare them with my Bose Quiet Comfort 15 noise-canceling headphones, my Shure E3 in-ear monitors, and my Yamaha YHD-1 orthodymanic headphones. I was actually somewhat surprised by the differences between them, and I thought that they all sounded fairly good by themselves. I think that the Bose earbuds and headphones were very similar. I thought they my Shure E3 had better clarity, though the Yamaha sound was more open and natural, but lacked a little low-end. While researching the earbuds, I ran across numerous articles on high-resolution audio as well, which is loosely anything that is more than the 44.1KHz sample rate with 16-bit depth (16/44) used by CD recordings. While many of the articles proclaimed how 24/96 or 24/192 sounded so much better than the overly compressed 16/44 recordings. I also found a number of articles like this one proclaiming that HD audio is like the modern-day equivalent “snake oil” marketing hype like tubes vs. transistors or oxygen-free speaker cables… Kirk McElhearn points out that at 16-bit, you can record up to 65K volume levels, and that 44KHz is the minimum sample rate to capture frequencies up to 20KHz, the standard for high-fidelity audio. If you think back to the time when we went from 256 colors, to 65K colors to 16.7M colors, the difference was dramatic, with 16.7M colors more life-like and photo-realistic. While we were mostly content with 65K colors, and probably can’t detect all 16.7M colors, the optimal color bit-depth probably lies somewhere in between

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Noise-Cancelling Headphones

Audio, Entertainment, Music / By / / / 3 minutes of reading

Jeannette’s office is being remodeled, and will be moving to more “modern” open, low-walled cubicles. She’s already worried about the noise distraction, so I’ve been looking into noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds for her. Since the dawn of time (or as long as they have been in business) I would say that I’ve not been a fan of Bose. Having worked in an audio shop while in college, we did some repairs to some of the original Bose 901 “direct/reflecting” speakers, which appears to be an array of 4″ paper cone drivers like you would find in a clock radio… While the reflecting concept was interesting, they didn’t seem to have a very full range. I preferred more open systems like the Magnaplanar or a time-phased array speaker like the Dahlquist DQ-10, upon which my home-built speakers are based. I have an older pair of Yamaha YHD-1 orthodymanic headphones, which are open back, and have a nice airy sound. However, since they are open back, they aren’t good at blocking ambient noises! When I decided that I needed noise-canceling headphones years ago, I bought a set of the original Bose Quiet Comforts, which I really liked. The sound wasn’t perfect from an audiophile perspective, but the noise-cancelling worked noticeably better than any others that I tried. After using those for several years, the sound on one side became intermittent, but I couldn’t tell if it was the cable or the electronics… When I was moving into our new open office building a couple of years ago, with low walled cubicles,

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I hate SPAM, and GoDaddy is Useless!

Computers, Hosting, Security, Websites / By / / , / 8 minutes of reading

After the debacle with my CenturyLink DSL last summer, I had to make a quick decision on alternatives to hosting my own domain, email and web. I ended up being off the network for two weeks when CenturyLink couldn’t figure out how to restore my DSL server when they did an upgrade that I had already cancelled. Many years ago, I used a domain-hosting service called DomainDiscover that registered my domains and DNS, redirected web requests inside of a frame, and relayed email from a virtual domain to my ISP account. After I started running Apple’s OS X Server, though, I realized that I could provide most of those services myself, on my own home server. My ISP, NeTrack, who was later acquired by Indra’s Net, provided a static IP address, so hosting my own domain was fairly straight-forward. Once I started running my own services locally, I decided that it wasn’t necessary to be paying DomainDiscover for the other services that I wasn’t using any longer. All I really needed was a domain registrar. Checking on pricing, it seemed that GoDaddy was about the least expensive, and while nobody had a great customer service record, GoDaddy was large and established, so I transferred my domain registrations to them. So, when my DSL was down for an extended period of time, I did some quick checking, and discovered that GoDaddy had recently started using CPanel virtual Linux hosting, and had hosting plans on sale for half-price, so it was only about $5/month, as I

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New Horizons spacecraft to give clearest look at Pluto

Pluto / By / / , / 1 minute of reading

New Horizons launched in 2006 and it is finally closing in on some of the farthest reaches of the solar system. It came out of hibernation last week on December 6, 2014, and is now in active mode. It will make its closet pass by Pluto next summer. Check out this story on 9news.com: http://www.9news.com/story/life/2014/12/15/new-horizons-spacecraft-to-give-clearest-look-at-pluto/20432895/ Here is a link to the mission page as NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/ And the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

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More Home Automation

Home Automation / By / / , , / 5 minutes of reading

After moving into our new house at the end of September, for my birthday in October I invested in some “Home Automation” stuff. I had been doing some research periodically over the past year or so, and had been following some of the INSTEON and Z-Wave news. I had decided that Indigo looked like the best option for Macintosh-based home automation, and it supported interfaces for X-10, INSTEON and Z-Wave, so it had lots of flexibility. I had been planning to go with INSTEON, but our new house came with a Schalge lock with a keypad entry that is Z-Wave enabled, so I went with Z-Wave devices instead. I ordered a copy of Indigo Pro 6, along with an Aeon Labs Z-Wave USB stick interface, an Evolve plug-in lamp dimmer module and two GE/Jasco Z-Wave On/Off wall switches to get started. The Schalge/Nexia starter kit that came with the lockset included a Z-Wave lamp dimmer module as well, so I have two of them to work with now. After my friend Jerry Nieman helped me install the wall switches to replace the front porch and patio light switches, I was able to install the Indigo software and drivers for the Aeon Labs USB stick on my MacMini server, and start up Indigo as a server process so that its always running. I can connect to Indigo from my MacBook Pro using a “client” installation of Indigo or from my iPad Air using their Indigo Touch app. Once I had Indigo setup, I linked with each of the Z-Wave switches and modules, so that i could control them through the software.

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Apple released a BASH Shell Security Update for Shellshock, kinda…

Computers, Macintosh, Security / By / / , , / 1 minute of reading

While Apple has released a security update to address the “shellshock” vulnerability in the bash shell, they have not made it available through Software Update! See the support page at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for links to the downloads and installation instructions. Update: Apple has rolled the bash shell update into Security Update 2014-005. See the details at: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6531 Presumably, the fix is also included in OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” (https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6535) which was released yesterday.

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