The Brunch Table

It’s not very well advertised at all, but Apple has a three-month worldwide warranty on any repair performed at an Apple-certified repair shop. This is completely separate from Applecare–it applies to any Mac you bring in, no matter how old. If the same problem recurs within three months, you can show your original receipt at a new repair shop, even in another country, and get it fixed for free. (Apple has a global repair database for verifying these things, apparently.) Any damage done to your Mac by the repair shop is also covered.

This would have been good to know back in April, when I first took my busted Powerbook to a friendly but incompetent (that’s what Napoleon says we should assume, right?) shop in The Hague. I’ve since learned that Apple’s policy has some interesting positive side effects:

• First, if you live in a place with more than one Apple repair joint, and you’re not getting good service at one shop, you can get a competitor to re-do the job for free.

• Second, if you do give up and take the computer somewhere else (in my case, to the very nice MacHouse in Amsterdam), you get better treatment–after all, the new shop now has a chance to poach someone else’s customer.

• Third, and best of all, since Apple will cover the cost of the do-over, the new shop doesn’t have the same incentive to cheat on repairs.

For me, the third time was the charm–a visit to the Toronto Apple Store revealed that the original shop in The Hague had damaged my Powerbook’s LCD panel while replacing its inverter board (handily turning a $200 repair into a $900 repair–you decide, incompetence or malice?).

It’s a shame Apple keeps this policy so quiet, presumably to cut down on the number of claims. I’m a confirmed agnostic, and there’s a lot I don’t like about their desktop products. But when it comes to precious, breakable laptops, the repair coverage is great stuff.

Finally, I can buy music from Apple without worrying about my lost DRM keys. It’s still at the compile-it-and-run-it-from-the-command-line stage, but playfair definitely converts protected Apple store M4P files into unprotected M4A (AAC) files. Thanks to Rod for the tip.

After a hiatus of three years, I finally own a working digital camera again (more on that later). As a result, I now have a use for iPhoto.

It’s always annoying to keep track of what files I’ve backed up to CD, but iPhoto can make the job easier using Keywords and Smart Albums. First, choose Photos > Show Keywords from the menu. This will give you a little window with some things like “Family”, “Birthday”, etc. Choose Add from the (horrible) Keywords drop-down menu in the dialog, and create a new keyword called “Archived”. Next, select File > New Smart Album… from the main menu. Give the new album a name like “Not Archived Yet”, and then choose Keyword, is not, Archived from the drop-downs. From now on, every new photo that you import will automagically appear in the “Not Archived Yet”. When that album reaches 650 MB or so (depending on the size of your CD-Rs), highlight it and use Burn (if you want a fancy iPhoto library CD) or File > Export… (if you want a more generic and compatible disc format) to archive the photos to a CD-R. Once you’re done, select all the photos in the “Not Archived Yet” album, select the “Archived” keyword in the Keywords window, and click Assign. This will clear the photos you just saved out of your “Not Archived Yet” album, leaving it open for the next batch.

Bonus Tip iPhoto ‘04 has a new full-screen edit mode that lets you flick through newly-imported photos quickly, fixing rotations and deleting the crappy ones as you go, but it’s rather hidden away by default. To use it, switch to Organize mode, click on the Slideshow icon at the bottom of the window, and then check off Display slideshow controls. Click Save Settings to close the dialog, select the album to view, and then click the “play” triangle at the bottom left of the window. You will get the photos blown up to full screen size, along with translucent controls for rotating, deleting, and rating the photos.

Apple’s new GarageBand software is apparently going for some sort of 80’s home stereo look.

After losing my preferences yet again to the rapacious swap files of OS X, and then waiting for roughly an hour while startup attempted to once more untangle my fscked-up disk, I’ve decided that it’s finally time to rebuild my iBook. Once my backup finishes running, I’m going to reformat my drive. This time, I’m going to try sequestering the virtual memory swap files on a separate 1GB partition using the likes of Swap Cop. Hopefully, this will (a) keep my swap files less fragmented, (b) protect my main partition (with its precious preference files) safe from the devouring swap files, and (c) keep me from tying up too much potential swap space with MP3s and such.

Here goes nothing…

Few things are more nerve-wracking than watching an unproven disk utility slowly have its way with your precious data.

Let me back up a bit. A couple weeks ago, after a rash of system crashes, my iBook started taking excessively long (like, 20 minutes) to start up. I booted up into text mode (by holding command-S during startup) and ran fsck, the built-in drive repair utility. (This is what’s running behind the scenes when your Mac takes a long time to boot.) It reported some volume structure problems. It would say something like “you have 203126 whatsits but it should be 203125–fixing it”, but then later on, it said “no, this 203125 whatsits should be 203126–let me take care of that”. Great. My operating system is spending 20 minutes chasing its own tail every time I start up. (more…)

So, Apple did indeed dump a new iTunes, iPod, and digital music store today, and now that their server load has died down a bit, I’ve taken the software and service for a spin.

At first blush, iTunes 4 doesn’t seem shockingly different from its predecessors. The note in the iTunes icon is now XBox green instead of Aqua blue. Apple’s resident design wankers have changed the buttons yet again, to the flat metal look first seen in Safari. There’s also a new button in the lower-left corner, which shows and hides a new panel for displaying album covers. These images are provided with purchased songs, but there doesn’t seem to be any handy automatic way to get them for normal MP3s or CDs. However, it’s straightforward enough to open a browser and drag in the appropriate image from the Amazon or CD Baby site. These images are stored in the actual song files (in the ID3 tags?)–they don’t show up when streaming songs via Rendezvous, but if you copy the file to another machine (remember, boys and girls, for personal use only!), the album cover image is carried along. (more…)

So Steven Frank (of Panic, purveyors of fine Mac software) has this crazy gleam in his eye, thinking about the possibilities of SDL and Lua (a lightweight scripting language) to create easily-tweakable cross-platform applications. Specifically, after attempting to live with “modern” PDAs, he’s obsessed with the possibility of creating a Newton-analog environment to run on modern hardware. He’s whipped up a tiny mockup for OS X.

It’s kinda nifty. Doesn’t do that much, but you can pop open the package and easily tweak the small scripts that describe all the behavior. I think that things like this and PyObjC are creating an interesting middle ground of first-class GUI applications that are easy for end-users to hack without installing crazy heavyweight environments or development tools. Konfabulator is also interesting in a similar way (easy to hack), though its apps aren’t first-class, and the user has to buy and install the platform, which is an annoying barrier to entry.

Apple certainly gave us an action-packed keynote today. Among other things, they finally unveiled their much-rumored native web browser, Safari. First impressions are below:
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One of the weird things that I’ve run into in OS X is that sometimes I miss the scroll bar and end up clicking on the window behind the one I’m looking at. I’m not sure why it’s such a problem–perhaps because there’s not much of a border between the scroll bar and the edge of the window? In any case, uControl is a nifty open-source hack that, among other things, lets me use the trackpad on my iBook as a “virtual scroll wheel” by holding down the Function key. It also does a few other handy tricks like swapping function keys, so you can use Windows USB keyboards with less weirdness. Finally, it has some of the chattiest control panels that I’ve ever seen, including a bogus option labeled “Your Option Here” as a solicitation to submit code.