Amateur PSK31 and Mac

I've been a dormant ham for a while now, but with some encouragement from my wife, I've recently got back on the air. Back in the day, I managed to work all the states on 20 meter AMTOR. Since then, the new AMTOR is a mode called PSK31. It's a digital mode optimized for keyboard-to-keyboard QSOs.

You have to use computer software to work PSK31. It converts your typing into audio, then converts the tones it hears from your transceiver back into text. It does the latter by listening for signals throughout the audio passband of your rig, showing them all in a waterfall display that you click on to choose either a blank spot to call CQ or on a signal to decode it and set up your transmitter to reply to.

So to make it work, you need to do three things:

1. Get the receiver's audio into the computer
2. Get the program's transmit audio into your transceiver
3. Allow the program to control your radio's PTT button

The grand plan was to buy a TigerTronics SignalLink USB. It looks to me to be the best possible solution. It connects to your computer only via a USB cable. It has an internal USB audio device and the signal isolation transformers necessary to keep the two apart. It uses VOX to key the radio (that is, when audio comes out of the audio device, it keys the radio automatically). All in all, it seems ideal. Unfortunately, however, they're 4-6 weeks backordered, since it appears that I'm not the only one who thinks it's an ideal solution.

The next best thing is a RigBlaster Plug-n-Play. It makes 3 connections to your computer - audio in, audio out and a USB connection. The USB connection is for a USB-to-serial adapter that is used for PTT and for an (optional) radio control serial port interface. The port's RTS line is connected directly to the radio's PTT actuator. There is a software download on West Mountain Radio's site that contains an unsupported MacOS X driver. From what I can tell, it works just fine.

On the software end, there is a program called MultiMode, but the interface seems awfully primitive to me. Plus it costs almost $90. Instead, I went with cocoaModem. It has an auxiliary helper program called cocoaPTT that will do the serial port RTS for PTT thing on behalf of cocoaModem. You just have to make sure that the rigBlaster is plugged in, then start cocoaPTT, then start cocoaModem.

Hooray for Time Machine!

We were beset by thieves at the office this weekend. I had my company MacBook Pro on a Kensington lock, but the thieves rummaged through my drawers until he found the key. D'oh! They did, however, leave behind the Time Machine drive. Well, the IT staff replaced the laptop this morning, and with fingers and toes crossed, I booted up the Leopard install DVD and went into the Time Machine restore menu item. The entire process was completely painless. About two hours later, the machine rebooted just as if nothing had ever happened. I did lose the Windows XP virtual machine, but that was because I told time machine to ignore it. It's a 20 GB opaque file that changes every time I run Windows, and I figured that would take up all my time machine space. I don't regret the decision, though, because all I used Windows for at work was to run Outlook and TOAD, both of which simply need to be reinstalled on top of a fresh Windows installation.

Is Leopard Apple's Vista?

It's a harsh thing to say, I know, but Leopard has been more troublesome than any other release of MacOS X to date. Let's run down my list of problems:

1. Mom doesn't like the way iCal's detail panel works. I can't say I blame her. What was wrong with the drawers, Steve?

2. On Scarlet's machine, the dock periodically disappears. The workaround is to kill Dock.app, but why is this necessary?

3. Suddenly screen and disk sharing from one of the mac minis to my laptop doesn't work. It says the password is wrong when you try and screen share (bullshit. It's the same password that works for ssh and screen/disk sharing from any other machine), and disk sharing just says that an unknown error occurred. In general, this is the one problem with macs. When shit doesn't work, it can sometimes be completely impossible to figure out why.

4. Back to my mac randomly works or doesn't work, depending on how lucky you are.

5. Time machine over airdisk. We were all but promised this functionality. We're on the eve of 10.5.2 [edit: 10.5.2 is out now] and still nothing.

Time machine and AirDisk

How was this not broadcast over the entire Mac-loving portion of the tubes?!

If you want to use Time machine over AirDisk (a USB hard disk connected to an Airport Extreme), type this into a terminal window on your mac:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Mischief managed!

thanks to this guy. Credit where it's due, and all that.

Macworld '08 Keynote - more questions than answers

So, as usual, the keynote was fun to watch, even if you have to watch it tape delayed. His Steveness is, as ever, the eternal showman.

My wife and I have iPhones, and we love them. It's nice to see the new features, which indeed were downloadable before the sun set on the day they were announced. Left un-announced, however, were a few things I'd still like to see support for:

1. GPS over bluetooth connectivity, for up-to-the-second positioning and turn-by-turn navigation. No, I don't want or need GPS built-in to the phone. The current functionality demonstrates sufficiently that it is not really necessary. Perhaps we'll see this in a TBD 3rd party native app when the SDK arrives.

2. Since day 1 I have been unable to make the phone's wifi work with internet connection sharing on a mac. This is a pretty glaring one, Steve. I'm not the only one either. The mac support forums light up with this one pretty frequently.

3. Dinging the iPod touch folks $20 for buying them sooner rather than later seems like deja-vu for us who bought the iPhone on the first day. At least the magnitude of the sting is less.

4. No A2DC profile for the iPod touch or iPhone? We still have to use wires and adapters? Humph.

I have a little bit more ire for the announcement of the Time Capsule. This is nothing more than the existing Airport Extreme with a hard-disk built into it. Steve billed this as a fix for those who found that at the last minute the ability to use Time Machine on a laptop with a USB disk shared from the airport was removed.

So help me figure this out, people. Somehow it's the 480 Mb/s USB interface that's the problem that's going to make it impossible to fix this without buying a new box with the drive built-in instead?

Now, in Steve's defense, he didn't say that this functionality wasn't going to be addressed for existing airport owners, and the new price points are competitive with what the prices of an old gigabit airport, external USB enclosure and drive would be.

Since I work at Netflix, I won't blog about the movie rental or Apple TV stuff. Sorry.

Lastly, though, was something I can't really complain about. The MacBook Air looks like a really fantastic machine. I know exactly to whom I'm going to recommend it. My mom! The 4 or 5 of you reading this who know me well are probably stunned by that, expecting me to name my wife or even myself. Nope. The time is right for mom's old, aging iBook to go. She's needed the optical drive on about 10 occasions, and she could use Dad's in a pinch. But for her, small and light trumps it all. I really think she'll love it. She'll particularly love jumping from a 1.mumble GHz G4 with 640M of RAM to a 1.6 GHz core 2 duo with 2 GB of RAM.

And no, it's not a surprise - I won't be buying it. :)

PokerStars native Mac client!

It's finally here! PokerStars now has a native Mac client. If you're familiar with P* on Windows, you won't find anything out of place here.

Of course, my first two tournaments with it were met with unbelievable cold deck losses, but it's been a bad night all 'round. I'm just happy to be able to get back on P* without the hassle of firing up Windows.

Just go to PokerStars (no, I don't get a kickback for the link) and click download. If you're using a Mac, you'll get sent to the mac download page. Like most Mac software, you just open the disk image and drag the application to wherever you want.

Oh, the irony

So one of the latest Get a Mac TV ad has the the PC saying, "If your printer doesn't work with Vista, buy a new printer!" As if Vista is guiltier than most OS upgrades at breaking older hardware.



Uh huh.

When we upgraded to Leopard, one of the things that didn't survive the upgrade was our HP PSC-1610 printer/scanner. So what did we do? We bought a new printer. Because our printer didn't work with Leopard. Pot, kettle, black.

IPv6 and Leopard

After a while of not having it working, I've managed to get IPv6 connectivity back to my house from the office. Huzzah! Now I can work around the broken Juniper VPN that we normally use.

Having got this working again (it's a combination of OpenVPN and the MacOS X port of the tun driver), I've rediscovered that AFP file sharing works over IPv6, like it used to in Tiger. Not only that, but Screen Sharing works over IPv6 too! The only hiccup there is that so far as I can tell, Screen Sharing can't figure out how to connect to IPv6 only DNS names. I've tried flushing the DS cache (with dscacheutil -flushcache), but that doesn't seem to help (nor was it necessary to get AFP by DNS name to work). Connecting to literal IPv6 addresses (wrapped with square brackets), however, does work.

So Big Ups to Apple for their commitment to IPv6! Now they just have to fix that one thing.

Apple has a sense of humor

This is kind of funny. In MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), convenient file-sharing functionality has been added to the Finder. It will show all the machines on the local network, and if it's an Apple device, it will use a picture of the machine as the icon. However, if it's a Windows machine (or anything else using SMB), you get a picture of a monitor with the BSOD. Ha ha.



It may be a little hard to see in the preview. Click on the picture to see it full size.

Idea for Apple

We have a mac Mini hooked up to our HDTV in the living room. Originally, the thought was we'd use it as a media player (DVD, Netflix Watch Now via VMware, games, etc), but over time it's become the machine I spend a large fraction of my time using. It's just very comfy to sit in the recliner and... well, whatever.

So when we upgraded from the old full sized plastic bluetooth keyboard to the new aluminum one, I was quite pleased.

But there is still one thing that isn't quite nirvana.

The mighty mouse is nice, but it needs to sit on a flat surface to be conveniently used. We have a mouse pad sitting on a fold-down faux table built-in to our sofa, but that's not very convenient for right handed users sitting on the right side. It's ok, since I usually set on the left, but I've got a better idea: A bluetooth trackpad. Such a device could be designed to attach to either side of the new aluminum BT keyboard, or Apple could come out with a new BT keyboard and trackpad combo. In fact, the trackpad could be designed to work with both the USB and BT keyboard. It could use some sort of mechanical attachment system combined with a (proprietary or USB) electrical connection that could be provided by both versions of the keyboard.

So let's get cracking, Steve!

One of these things is not like the other

I went to the Apple store at Valley Fair today to pick up a new monitor and have some lunch (Genghis Khan's mongolian BBQ in the food court. Almost as good as our normal mongo on El Camino, but they're open for lunch on Sunday). While I was there, I stumbled upon the Dell kiosk. Since I had my iPhone, I decided to snap a picture:



Now, the Apple store is actually under construction right now. They have a temporary store open in a little sliver of space next door to the real store. The temporary store isn't nearly as large or nice as the real store used to be. I can only hope that the new store will be an improvement. Anyway, with all that as a prologue, here's what the Apple store looked like at about the same time as the picture above of the Dell kiosk:



Uh huh. I don't think anyone needs to wonder if it's really true that Apple is gaining market share.

The future of Microsoft

With the release of iWork '08, Apple now has a competitive answer that lines up perfectly against Microsoft's two main monopolistic pillars: Windows and Office.

If Apple continues to gain installed-base share, it won't be too long before the automatic nature of the purchasing policies of business stop being quite so automatic. When that happens, the curve will get a nice knee in it and Apple will at the very least achieve a duopoly.

At that point, what does Microsoft do?

It took them 6 years to release Windows XP.2, aka Vista. And the world has not stopped yawning. Will Vista be the last monopoly Windows product?

I think everyone can agree that without the monopoly propping it up, Windows has nothing to recommend it. And it's interesting to note that the only competition left are Unix clones of one sort or another (in fact, MacOS X recently passed the Open Group's Unix certification, so it's safe to say that MacOS X is not just a Unix clone anymore - it IS Unix).

The Windows NT architecture is dead. It hasn't seen any significant development since Windows 2000. Microsoft's development cycles are doubling in length for each minor release (though if that trend continues, Vista's successor won't appear until 2019, so it's unlikely that it will). Microsoft has, in the past, stated that .Net was the way forward, but most apps for Windows still use the WIn32 api. In that sense, the applications barrier to entry is now working against Microsoft in exactly the same way it has worked against Java and all of the rest of its competitors.

No, it's clear that Microsoft's only alternative to move forward is to do what Apple did when it was in the same spot 10 years ago. Microsoft needs to throw away the underlying architecture and start over. And as it does so, it can provide a backwards compatibility layer for legacy Win32 applications.

So what should they choose?

Linux.

Shocking? Not so much. I didn't say GNU/Linux. I don't suggest that Microsoft should adopt the Gnu LIBC implementation. Microsoft would likely make a clean-room reimplementation of the basic Unix library set. Why would they do that? Because they'll be falling back on their old bag of tricks: embrace, enhance, destroy. By making subtle, incompatible changes to the API, they can re-achieve platform lock-in. Doing this in the kernel will be virtually impossible because of the GPL. But the kernel is irrelevant. Make the libraries proprietary and Microsoft will realize the revenue stream anyway. See also: Mach and MacOS X.

What would Microsoft gain from this strategy? Well, assuming they didn't do it in an asinine way, they'd gain a lot of security improvements. They'd gain incalculable political points - they'd be able to claim that they were based on an "open" system, even though the most important bits would be closed. They'd pass off development and maintenance of their kernel to someone else, effectively, which would dramatically reduce their costs. And to top it all off, this is the exact same play that Apple made when they brought out OS X, so it's not a completely unprecedented move.

It would take some imagination for someone in the upper echelons to grasp this concept. It's not something I think Steve would be able to figure out without help. But maybe Bill still has enough imagination left.

Parallels Desktop v. VMware Fusion

Those of you who haven't been paying attention might have missed the fact that Macs now have Intel processors in them. This means that they can run Windows without ugly, slow CPU emulation. Instead, you can use Boot Camp to boot the machine directly into a separate Windows partition, or you now have a choice of two competing commercial virtualization offerings: Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion.

I've been using Parallels for some time now. They certainly have gotten more right than wrong, but although Fusion is late to the party (and it isn't even released yet), I have to say, their initial offering is a very, very strong competitor with the more mature Parallels product.

Suspending and resuming virtual machines in Parallels has always been a sore spot for me. Though the screen will pop up quite quickly, the entire machine - both the host and guest - seem to be mired in a tar pit for a very long time while the virtual machine pages itself in. During this time, you really have no indication of what is happening or how long it might take. Perhaps this has more to do with the fact that I use Mac Minis that have slow disks, but even so, it's an annoyance.

The only other real difference of any consequence I have found so far is when using the Netflix Watch Now movie player. Under parallels, rapid motion and panning camera shots often show ugly visible "tearing" artifacts. This is likely caused by a lack of synchronization between the vertical refresh interval of the monitor and the virtual graphics card in the guest. Fusion doesn't have this problem. The netflix player in full screen looks and acts, to my eye, exactly like it would running under Boot Camp.

The other sore spot is converting from one to the other. Although you'd really only likely ever have to do this once, so far as I am aware, in both directions it is a byzantine arrangement involving installing a special Windows program in the opposite software's guest and having it write out the disk contents to a network share. Ugh. Even then, there are a couple of added annoyances. VMWare's virtual machine supports ACPI. The Parallels one does not. There is no way to switch Windows XP from standard to ACPI, so you wind up with no MP support and other quirks until/unless you reinstall Windows. Plus, the Parallels tools won't de-install unless you run the deinstall from within Parallels. There's no real harm in leaving the tools there, but you can't get rid of them.

I took VMware up on their pre-release pricing offer and bought a license. At the time, I figured I was just donating money to a lost cause. Parallels had such a lead, it was hard to imagine VMware being able to catch up. Boy, was I wrong. Now we've got a horse race. And the real winners are mac users who are surely going to benefit one way or the other.

.Mac ate my address book!

I was trying to write an e-mail this morning and Mail wasn't filling in by name. After much fussing, I opened the address book... and it was empty!

I have syncing turned on on 4 machines, so I'm not sure which one of them lost its tiny little mind, but the rot hadn't extended all the way: there was still one machine with all of the data, so I quickly reset .Mac sync from that machine, telling it to overwrite .Mac with the data from that machine. So everything's back to normal, but in the confusion, I think I did lose one of my calendar entries. Who knows what else has gone bonkers. Sheesh.

Parallels 3.0

I decided to take advantage of Parallels' 50% off upgrade offer to try version 3.0, which now has limited support for accelerated 3d graphics. Just to see what it was capable of, I fired up our old favorite game back at Cenzic, BZFlag. With all of the options turned on, running at 720p on a Mac Mini, I was getting frame rates in the mid 20s. That's pretty impressive, I think, for a relatively whimpy machine running in an emulated environment.

So now there really is almost no reason to consider boot camp on a mac anymore, I think. If you really, really require perfect native performance, then why on earth did you buy a mac in the first place?

When Mac Mini upgrades go bad

Well, I'm 2 for 3 in upgrading Mac Minis.

This time, I managed to break not one, but two of the heatsink retaining clips. I did manage to get the other two on opposite corners of the heatsink so it's on the CPU, but it can't be good...

Not only that, but I also managed somehow to make the internal speaker not work. Since I've got it connected up via TOSLINK to a stereo it doesn't really matter, but it's still sort of a downer.

So if anyone knows why the internal speaker isn't working or where one can get some more of those plastic-and-spring heat sink retaining clips (that are probably special to the Mini), let me know.

Mac migration assistant

If you've been following along, you'll remember that my old Powermac G5's power supply died on me. So I took it into the Apple store to get fixed and decided that it was a sign that it was time to move on. I bought a mini, which I will upgrade to a Core 2 duo as soon as it arrives. It's not the first intel mac in the house - there's also a mini plugged into the TV in the living room.

One thing I did before I took the Powermac to the Apple store was take the hard drive out. The geniuses are probably not going to go snooping through it, but it's easy to imagine the drive getting formatted by accident. Besides, if the power supply died, there's every chance it took more components with it. Better to find out now the state of the drive.

So I pulled it out and attached it to a power supply and SATA->USB adapter I keep around for dealing with bare drives. The drive was fine, thank goodness.

But the mini was on its way. How do I coonveniently get all that stuff onto it? The minis have 2.5" drives, so I can't just shoehorn the drive in there. Besides, the new mini has an Intel CPU, which requires different partitioning. I decided I would put the old drive in an external housing and try to use the Migration Assistant to copy the data in. Then I could blank the drive and use it as external storage.

But how do you use just a bare drive with the Migration assistant? Simple! The migration assistant works by getting you to connect the two macs together, then boot the old one in Firewire target mode. So long as your external housing has a Firewire port, it will look just like a mac booted into target mode.

So I was easily able to migrate all my stuff. The migration assistant takes waaaay too long to run, but the results are worth it. It's as if your new machine was your old one again. The only other thing to do was to migrate my virtual PC machine to Parallels using the Parallels Transporter, which was simple enough.

Powermac for sale

I got the powermac back from the apple store earlier this week. Turns out the cost to fix it is just about exactly what Apple Care would have cost (which would have made the repair free), so from that perspective it was a wash. I put the original 80 GB drive back in the machine, wiped it and reinstalled Tiger and Virtual PC (which I'm selling along with the powermac. It wouldn't be worth running on my Powerbook, and it's next anyway). It's on eBay if anybody is interested.

It's amazing what happens to computers. 3 years ago, that machine was top of the line, built like a tank - the very epitome of computing horsepower. Now, the mini that replaced it is scarsley larger than 5 mousepads stacked atop each other and is actually faster. Go figure.

You can see Gizmo in the eBay picture behind the machine. And no, he's not included.

Addendum: It sold for $810. Woo hoo!

Upgrading Mac Minis

My Powermac G5's power supply died last week. That event sort of provided the catalyst to upgrade my desktop machine to an Intel mac. I took the machine in to the Apple store to get fixed. It cost $300, but that's what buying Apple Care for that machine would have cost to start with. I'm going to put that machine up on eBay.

The question was, with what should I replace it?

A Mac Pro? I don't really use my desktop machine enough to spend that sort of money. My wife has a Mac Pro. But it's her primary machine and she uses it for just about everything. So she should have the best. I'm usually someplace other than the back office, so I'm not in there much.

An iMac? Well, I have a 23" ADC Cinema Display that doesn't have anything wrong with it. I'd have to eBay that as well and then buy a 24" iMac. That plan does have the added bonus of giving me a 3.5" hard disk that would be replaceable. But again, I don't use that machine very much.

A MacBook or MacBook pro? No, I already have a Powerbook - this is going to be a desktop machine.

Well, all that's left is the mini. But that's ok - I've bought two others in the past and they make fine machines.

I bought the cheap mini. This was a tactical error on my part - the cheap minis come with Combo drives instead of Superdrives. Oops. I'll fix this by swapping the optical drive with my office mini. I don't need to burn DVDs there.

I bought the cheap mini because the first thing I do with a new mini is swap out the CPU for a Merom - a Core 2 Duo. This gives about a 33% boost in cpu speed (a combination of having a faster clock speed and just being more efficient than the 1.6 GHz Core Duo they ship) without affecting the power or thermal footprint of the chip. The core 2 chips also support virtualization (good for Parallels) and 64 bit extensions. It's a no-brainer.

The Internet is full of blog postings about how to take your mini apart and upgrade it, so I won't duplicate them here.

Stuck DVD in iBook slot-loading drive

My sister-in-law has an iBook that she bought on our recommendation. A few days ago she reported that there was a DVD (rented from the local Lackluster Video) that wouldn't eject. I searched high and low and the collective advice of the Internet was that it wasn't really user servicable for Sister-in-Laws, so I told her to take it to the Apple store. The genius there gave it a quick try and then said it would cost over $400 to send it in for service.

Screw that.

She was going to fly out here for a visit soon anyway, so when she got here, I'd just take the case apart and get it done.

But I thought about it some more. One of the pages my searching got me to was a page at Apple that mentioned that the drives had to be operated in the normal horizontal position and that other orientations were not supported. That got me thinking.

So I asked her over the phone to hold her iBook upside-down, but without covering up the slot, then press the eject button. The disc summarily popped right out.

So next time a disc get stuck in your slot-loader Mac laptop, try holding the machine at various angles to see if you can get a little help from gravity.

Note that this applies to disks that are "hardware" stuck - that you can hear the mechanism trying to spit out. If it's "software" stuck, then just reboot the machine and hold the mouse button down and it should spit it out.