Whilst Qantas have banned Dell owners from recharging their laptops in business class, Virgin Atlantic have also banned Powerbook and Macbook owners from doing similarly due to the risk posed by battery fires. There doesn’t seem to be any mention about it on Virginblue’s site though.
Archive for September, 2006
Laptop recharging banned in-flight.
Friday, September 22nd, 2006Kyocera Mita scan to Mac
Thursday, September 21st, 2006I’m trying to convince our fancy Kyocera Mita photocopier to scan to my computer, which it did yesterday, but refuses to do so now.
When I ran the install I got a dialog indicating that S2MLoginSetup had crashed with a “nil bundle identifier”
It looks like as well as the “KM Scan to Mac” application in /Applications/Utilities there are also a whole load of files in /Library/Application\ Support/KyoceraMita/, namely
- KMListenerX
- ListenerLauncher.app
- PrimaryListenerLauncher.app
- S2MLoginSetup.app
- loginwindow.plist
- post1.sh
- post2.sh
Where post1.sh is:
#!/bin/sh /bin/mv -f /Library/Application Support/KyoceraMita/loginwindow.plist ~/Library /Preferences/loginwindow.plist /bin/rm -f /Library/Application Support/KyoceraMita/needlogin /bin/chmod 755 ~/Library/Preferences/com.Kyocera.fileutility.plist
and post2.sh contains:
#!/bin/sh /bin/rm -f /Library/Application Support/KyoceraMita/loginwindow.plist /bin/chmod 755 ~/Library/Preferences/com.Kyocera.fileutility.plist
It also looks like the loginwindow.plist tries to launch /Library/Application Support/KyoceraMita/ListenerLauncher.app.
So for good measure I did the chmods, ran ListenerLauncher.app, PrimaryListenerLauncher.app, and KMListenerX, although you might want to try each of those steps and see if the connection works in between times (and looking at a ‘ps -auxwww’ it looks like I’ve got two copies of some of them running). Unfortunately I’m a fair way from the printer so I thought I’d hedge my bets.
Why Flock is cooler than Safari
Wednesday, September 20th, 2006Firstly, a disclaimer, I have a friend who works on Flock.
Reasons why Flock’s cooler than Safari
- Integration with flickr and photobucket, drag your photos in to upload them. Add your friends’ albums to Flock and get notified when any of them upload new photos (Really it should probably autodetect who your friends are from your list of friends already on flickr). Although with lots of scrolling through the photobar at the top of the window I almost began to feel motion sick
- Based on Firefox. Some Firefox plugins work (like the one to save your tabs between browsing sessions).
- The Wordpress editing bar works when you’re writing posts on the “Write Post” page (it doesn’t appear in Safari for me).
- “Blog this” option that brings up an HTML editor complete with ‘Publish’ button to post to your blog. The editor is automatically populated with a link to the page you were viewing. Multiple blogs are supported (Wordpress, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Blogger, or blogs using the Movable Type, MetaWeblog, Blogger or Atom APIs)
- A scrapbook that records text clippings. You can drag these out of the scrapbook bar at the bottom of the screen, or command-click on the clippings to open the “blog this” editor.
- Also has RSS Feed subscriptions
MacBook shutdowns due to dodgy heatsinks?
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006Various rumours around the place indicate that the spontaneous MacBook shutdowns might be due to a poorly designed heatsink. Of course the replacement heatsink is not yet available, which would probably present a significant delay if you need to get your MacBook repaired or replaced.
Apparently the workaround for the moment is to start the machine up in 1GHz mode by holding down the power switch for 5 seconds at startup.
New iSights to be released?
Monday, September 18th, 2006The Australian Apple Store is currently listing iSight availability as 1-2 months. So either there’s a big run on iSights from people with built in cameras who want to be able to take photos without waving their laptops around, or there’s a new release in the pipeline.
Xserve RAID battery backups may contain recalled iBook batteries?
Sunday, September 17th, 2006There’s a worrying report from an Apple Certified Engineer over on Macintouch that indicates that Xserve RAID battery backup units may contain recalled iBook batteries. (Scroll up a bit).
Lets hope your Xserve doesn’t catch fire and burn up your 1.5TB of data!
Lots of broken batteries
Friday, September 15th, 2006Thought for the day: When you have to return the batteries from 380 students’ laptop batteries, it’s a real pain. Especially as the students can’t use the laptops in classrooms without the batteries as there aren’t powerpoints to plug them all in.
Free Mac OCR
Thursday, September 14th, 2006I discovered gocr the other day. Conveniently there’s a fink package install (albeit of version 0.39-11 versus the current 0.41). It’s pretty easy to use (for a commandline app), and it does actually manage to do some recognition. Unfortunately it seems that there’s lots of empty whitespace and frequent misrecognition of lookalike glyph pairs.
At pretty much the same time there was an announcement on Slashdot that Google had open sourced Tesseract, a technology originall from HP in the 1993 era. Unfortunately attempting to compile it under Mac OS X resulted in it wanting Linux’s limits.h file. At that point I gave up. Interesting to note that Google are hunting OCR experts though. More food for their search engine.
Then it’s over to Spamassassin where there seem to be several different options for Spamassassin OCR plugins. I’ve had a go at doing an installation but am not convinced it’s working. And I’m currently collecting gifs from spam messages to experiment with. Some of them even have the same checksum which should make it pretty easy to detect them via a lookup.
Quinn
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006A great quote on VersionTracker:
Quinn is an implementation of a popular falling-blocks game, which, according to the Tetris Company, must not be named here
Apple reinvents TV with iTV
Wednesday, September 13th, 2006So, want to watch a show on TV, but there’s nothing on? In 2007 Apple’s iTV device will allow you to view TV you buy from the iTunes Store.
I guess the questions are: Does it need a Mac or a PC? I suspect it needs a machine configure it, got to enter your iTunes Store ID or credit card number somehow.
Does it have a hard drive? I guess the question is really can it do progressive start HD H.264 movies over a standard ADSL connection for 2 hours or so without dropouts? Or do you download to your local machines’ copy of iTunes then push it to the iTV like you send music to an Airport Express’ speakers? This seems perhaps more realistic. Then they can sell you a Mac as well.
Does it have a tuner? No. I guess it’s really an iTunes Store accessory 
Will be interesting to see how the Cable and media companies react to this. It will bring video on demand to the masses, without requiring the technical knowledge of BitTorrent, with legality, and without the halfheartedness of previous attempts by media and other industry players.
Of course if it takes 30 minutes to download a movie, that’s a problem, but mostly people will probably be watching series, and iTunes can probably handle something like a season pass without much sweat (although do you pay per season in advance or per show? Being from Australia I’m not sure what the current state of play is with series purchases on the iTunes store).
Really, Apple stands to be the world’s biggest TV channel. Anywhere there’s an iTunes Store, there’s access. Apple also makes the publishing side of things with Final Cut and iMovie etc. Not many people have portable TV’s they carry everywhere, but lots have video iPods.
