This Sunday, while Becky and I were housecleaning, my venerable Mac clone machine suffered a brain hemmorhage. Despite my many attempts to revive it, including completely disassembling and reassembling all of the parts, and replacing the power supply with a fresh, new one, the machine will now no longer boot up.

So now I am faced with the task of acquiring a computer to replace my dear old desktop machine. We do of course still have the Pismo Powerbook and Becky’s HP Pavillion, so we’re not without computers. But I do like having a desktop Mac which can also act as a server – home.prwdot.org was hosted on the now-deceased PowerMac.

With that in mind, I’ve revamped my ‘clearance sale’ that has been on the ***Project K|http://projectk.mine.nu:90*** website for a while now. It now includes items from the ex-computer that can be salvaged and used in other computers. The sale also includes other random items such as CD players, SCSI CD-ROM drives, cell phones, Anime DVD’s, and other electronic gadgets.

So visit ***The Sale|http://projectk.mine.nu:90/viewtopic.php?t=83*** and see if there’s anything you’d be interested in buying to help out a good cause. Many thanks to my friend Dylan from the ***All Things Macintosh|http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/macdsl*** forum at Broadbandreports.com for running the Project K forum and for putting up the big announcement on his site.

I’ve created a new blog, which you can see here:

***PCS Photo Blog|http://home.prwdot.org/~prw/cgi-bin/pcsblog.pl***

At first glance, it just looks like some photos with captions. But what’s really cool about it is how the photos and captions get up there.

My ***Sanyo SCP-8100|http://www.sanyo.com/wireless/handsets/scp-8100.htm*** phone from ***SprintPCS|http://www.sprintpcs.com/*** can take small photo snapshots. Then, from the phone, you can add a text caption and a voice memo, and send it all to any number of email addresses, or other multimedia-capable phones.

So what I did (and I got the idea from “Maokh” at the Sprintusers.com forum) was write a program to capture the emails sent to a certain email address, extract all of the relevant information from them, and insert it into a database. Then, I wrote another program which goes to that database, selects all of the information, and displays it in a blog. Simple! 😉

So basically what this amounts to is that I can post photos, text, and audio to a blog, all by simply sending an email from my cell phone – no additional user intervention required!

I hope you all get a kick out of reading it. 🙂

For a while now, I’ve been sick of iPhoto. We have nearly 2,800 digital photos in our collection, and frankly, iPhoto CHOKES on them. It takes a couple minutes for iPhoto to start up, another minute for it to load albums, and god forbid I should try to insert a digital media card to import new photos, that takes another minute to come up. Then there is the process – iPhoto downloads the photos into its library at the speed of greased molasses, puts them into a “Film Roll”, and then I must sort through the images, delete the bad ones, and rotate the ones that need rotating. I also organize them into Albums, for some reason. Then, THEN! If I want to put those photos on the web, I must export them all in a smaller format, upload them to our web server, and put them into the gallery. All of this just to get photos on the web!

Now, I thought to myself, couldn’t I leverage some of those useful programming skills I’ve learned to make this tedious process easier? So I set to it.

First, iPhoto was nixed. Too slow, too painful, too buggy. Sometimes it would HANG when trying to rotate a photo.

Next, I found some tools that I could work with:

* Image Magick – a set of UNIX utilities that allow you to manipulate images from the command line, as opposed to a graphical point-and-click program like iPhoto

* Perl Magick – an interface from Perl to Image Magick. Perl being my native programming language, this lets me manipulate images from within Perl programs I write. It’s included with Image Magick.

Using Perl and those tools, I wrote a couple of programs:

* pPhoto: This accomplishes one task, but it does it well. In one shot, it copies all of the images from my digital media card, puts them in an archive on my computer, creates web-sized copies of all the files, and uploads those copies to our web server. pPhoto can actually pull images from anywhere, not just a digital media card – so you could point it to a Photo CD, a shared folder on your network, or another folder on your hard drive. The only thing pPhoto doesn’t do is rotate our photos automatically, and discard the bad photos. The second thing we will most likely always have to do ourselves, but the first one could possibly be automated, were we using a different camera. Many of the newer digital cameras have “orientation sensors”, which will record the position the camera was being held along with the other photographic information. Using this, my program could automatically figure out which way a photo should go, and rotate it accordingly. But since my camera doesn’t do that, I have no way to test it. Therefore, rotation must be done manually as well. Fortunately, the web-based photo gallery software we use on our website is capable of deleting, rotating, and other photo manipulation, so we can mess with the photos once they are on-line.

* gallerize: Since I now have a nice archive of photos on my hard disk, it would be good to have an easy way to navigate them without using iPhoto. gallerize takes a directory full of images, creates thumbnails for each image, and then creates an HTML index page so that we can view and download the full sized versions of each image.

Should I need to do any other manipulations of the images on our computer, I can simply use the ‘convert’ utility that Image Magick provides – just fire off a quick command from the keyboard, it does its work on the image, and gets out of the way. No need for iPhoto there.

Overall, these programs will reduce the amount of effort and frustration involved in importing our photos, which means all of you readers get to see our latest photos much faster.

If you’re interested in seeing the code for either of the programs I wrote, let me know. It is written and Perl and should run on any system that has Perl installed, including Mac OS X, Windows with ActivePerl, and essentially every UNIX or Linux system.

Remember the Smurfs? They were three apples high.

And three Apple Stores is what the Boston area is about to have.

On Saturday, June 14, at 10 a.m., the Chestnut Hill Apple Store will open. It is located at the Chestnut Hill Mall in Chestnut Hill, an eastern neighborhood of Newton, Massachusetts.

I’m not sure if I will be able to attend the opening of this store, but for more information, click here.

For those who don’t know, the other two Apple Stores are located at the CambridgeSide Galleria in Cambridge, and at the Northshore Mall in Peabody.

At first I thought it was a joke, but it looks like it is for real:

Palm announces acquisition of Handspring

Yes, it’s true… as of today, Palm, Inc. has announced plans to acquire Handspring. The deal is supposed to close this fall.

I’d like to observe a moment of silence for the company that made the break away from Palm in the beginning to offer innovative, value-packed PDA’s. The Visor’s trademark feature was its “Springboard” expansion slot, which allowed developers to create pluggable hardware modules that could be added at any time. Some modules which I myself have had include:

Wireless Web Digital Link: This turned my Visor into a SprintPCS mobile phone
Magellan GPS Companion: This turned my Visor into a Global Positioning System tracking device
MemPlug Compact Flash: This allowed my Visor to read and write to Compact Flash memory storage cards
Backup Module: This allowed my visor to back up its entire contents in a jiffy, and restore them just as quickly.

My first Handspring, purchased in the summer of 2000, was the Visor Deluxe. I later purchased the thin, metallic Visor Edge and gave the Deluxe to Becky. I continue to use the Visor Edge to this day. I keep all of my phone numbers and addresses on it, use it to keep track of appointments, balance our checkbook, get information on restaurants and other attractions while traveling, and read news and entertainment updates.

It has been a great piece of equipment, and I fully plan to continue using it until it dies or has outlived its usefulness.

I present a photo of the Visor Edge, taken today with my cameraphone, as a salute to the wonderful products that Handspring has created. Hopefully their innovations will continue with their acquisition by Palm, and perhaps I will be a Palm customer in the future.

Yup, finally got the new phone. It’s cool. It takes pictures, it surfs the web, and of course, makes phone calls.

And when Becky calls me, her picture shows up on the front, and the theme song to “The Muppet Show” plays. 🙂

What a wonderful toy! See it below.

I went to the iPod party at the Apple Store tonight. What is an iPod Party, you may ask? Take a look at my gallery to see:

The iPod Party

Apple released a new series of slimmer, lighter, more powerful iPods, and they celebrated by throwing yet another party. This one wasn’t quite as well attended as another Apple Party that I attended, but it was still fun. I came away with a free poster and a $10 t-shirt with the outline of an iPod on the front, and the party announcement on the back.

Go Apple!

Just a warning… I am working on a rather long blog entry about Apple’s new music service. It should be ready later today, but just as a reminder, please scroll down after you are finished reading it, and check out the other great posts on our blog. 🙂

Thanks.

I know you’re all shocked to see a post from me in the Techie category. Frankly I’m surprised as well. Here’s a little story for you.

A couple of Friday’s ago I was sitting on the couch with my Peter and I expressed my burning desire to play old school Nintendo games. Figuring that I would just have to suppress that desire I went back to watching the Friday night drivel on TV.

A short time later I heard the familiar Do-do-do, do-doot-do-do, etc. coming from the den. Peter had made it so that I could play these games on the computer. Woohoo!

I enjoyed playing Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, and 3, but couldn’t get very far in the games. I finally pinpointed the problem. I am the poster-girl for what Peter calls “the movsies”. In other words it is very hard for me to get Mario to jump without making the corresponding moves with my arms. ie. to jump right I would swing my arms to the right. While using the keypad it was impossible to make these movements.

Friday, Peter came home with a present for me. A game controller hand thingy… I can plug it into the computer and play to my heart’s delight.

I’m still not very good, though.

In the world of technology, no news can sometimes be good news. I haven’t mentioned a whole lot on the blog here, mostly since things have been working pretty well. But for the sake of pure information, here is a status report on where the Wood Family’s technology is at.

Land Line Voice Communications
Currently serviced by Comcast Telephony. This service runs in through our cable lines, and connects to our apartment’s phone jacks. The call quality is good, and our local, regional toll, and long distance calls are all handled by the system. The caller ID information is also better than the information Verizon used to provide. We have two similar GE telephones, one with caller ID, and the other with a digital answering machine.

Wireless Voice Communications
Currently serviced by Sprint PCS. We have a service plan that provides 500 anytime minutes, unlimited night and weekend minutes, and unlimited PCS-to-PCS calling. This means that Becky and I can make as many calls as we want between our two phones and will not be charged for them. This also means we can call my parents’ or my sister’s cell phones from our cell phones at no cost to us. We have had some problems with Sprint not billing us correctly for PCS-to-PCS minutes, but I have been able to resolve those problems by ultimately going to our local Sprint PCS store and talking to the assistant manager (who it turns out is originally from Mount Vernon, Ohio). Becky currently has the venerable Sanyo SCP-4000 (coming up on 3 years old… it didn’t even make it onto Sanyo’s “previous models” page!) and is loving it. I am currently using the Samsung SCH-A400, and am rather frustrated with it. Thus I’m currently looking at purchasing a new phone. One of the candidates is the Sanyo SCP-8100. This is a PCS Vision-enabled camera phone. It has similar features to Sanyo’s 5300, but is smaller in size and has a lower quality camera. Since I already have a digital camera, that’s not such a big deal. It looks like a fun phone to have, especially with Sprint’s Vision service, and it comes in at a good price when I get the phone upgrade discount. I actually got to check out a demo model at the local Sprint PCS store, and it looks to be a very solid phone. It’s a bit thicker than the phone I’m using now, but still easy to carry and use.

Data Communications
At home we are currently using Comcast High-Speed Internet. We have not had any problems with our service. It just works!

Our web hosting provider, Site 5, has been performing admirably well. I have not had much need to contact their technical support, and their service has been up and running consistently. We still have plenty of storage space left on our account. Becky and I also run our email through Site 5’s servers, and we haven’t any problems with that. Five stars for Site 5!

Computing
Becky’s desk is currently equipped with an HP Pavillion 6730 running Windows XP Home. I recently relented and gave her back the LCD monitor so that she could have some more room on her desk.

My desk is currently equipped with a SuperMac S900 and a PowerBook G3 “Firewire”, both running Mac OS X 10.2.5. The S900 was upgraded a couple of months ago, and has been performing well since then. When I gave Becky back the LCD monitor, I bought a new 17″ CRT monitor to use with the S900. It was a fairly cheap model, $100 after a mail-in rebate, but it performs just fine for everyday use.

While we were visiting my parents over Easter, I took the opportunity to install Mac OS X on their computer. From what I tried while I was home, and from the reports I’ve heard since I left, things are working well!

As you can see, there are certain devises we associate with certain processes. It is hardly possible to use HP for industrial purposes, so there are special computers that you can find at https://cp-techusa.com/rugged-lcd-monitors/.

Audio Entertainment
My iPod continues to perform well, day after day. Thanks to some recent software updates by Apple, its battery life has improved significantly. It is almost filled to capacity, and I’ve recently had to delete some less-frequently-listened-to music files from it in order to add new music.

Video Entertainment
We recently upgraded to Comcast Digital Cable, so that we could get all of the TV stations we wanted, and then some. In particular, Becky wanted TLC so that she could watch While You Were Out, and I wanted to get some of the news stations and FX network. Incidentally, upgrading to Digital Cable put us into a Comcast Bundle, so we now actually get our High-Speed internet for a little bit less per month!

The home entertainment system hasn’t been used too much recently. Becky and I have been too busy to have occasion to watch a DVD, but hopefully we will have more time to do that soon!

That’s all that’s noteworthy on the technology front!