Rotate it!

On Mac, you may rotate your 2nd monitor to different directions! Something I just found tonight when testing my iMac's video performance (#1).

I ain't sure if this apply to all Mac or only iMac, or work only because of my ViewSonic VP171s which support rotation. Nice thing from Mac. This works easier than that on Windows, and FREE! Program that rotate monitor for Windows, shipped with the monitor, requires update and only free if you purchase monitor within 6 months (of course, everytime we just declare that it is a new monitor). The only difference is, for Mac, rotate a secondary monitor and for Windows, rotate the primary monitor.

Open System preferences > Display, two windows show up nicely, each on each monitor. On the secondary monitor, click Rotate dropbox on lower right to reveal four options: Standard, 90°, 180° and 270°. Choosing any options other than Standard will prompt you to confirm new settings (15s time-out). When changing settings, it is much faster than Windows' Desktop in Control Panel. Simple and fast. No fading or other useless-n-stupid features.


#1: Using iTunes as brenchmark (by Macworld Video): play a song in iTunes, press ⌘T to turn on visualization, ⌘F to triggle full screen, T to disable rate capping and F to show frame rate. I got 62-64 for my iMac (20" iMac Core2Duo 2.16G, 2x512MB, with 2nd monitor on DVI-D).

Jobs vs. Gates

Jobs vs. Gates, featuring C64! Not to mention that Apple, Microsoft, Vista, OS X and... Finder! Funny enough.

Nokia N70 returned!

To my surprice, my Nokia N70 was fixed this morning. I got a call from repair center at 11AM, telling me that I can pick up my phone at anytime.

My Nokia N70 was return to me just as if nothing has done. However, the motherboard was replaced (oh, I forgot to reset it before sending to repair, anyway, there should be nothing sensitive or interested to the repair guys). The firmware becomes V 5.0638.3.0.1 18-09-06. The key sound problem still exists (when you have key sound on, at idle screen, press # once only and you will hear a long beep).

Since the motherboard is changed, so does the Bluetooth address. To avoid Bluetooth device list confusion on my computers, I give the "new" device a new bluetooth name. Now, my laptop, my NAS, Nokia E50 and Nokia N70 are named with animal speices name. Only my PS3, PSP and iMac has not using animal species as their names (well, I guess this will be changed soon).

Now, time to restore. With the Nokia PC Suite, it's quite simple and easy to restore. You just connect the phone, press "Restore" and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait. Oh! How long does this progress takes? Well, I don't know. Probably over an hour. Anyway, the restore process end with an error. What? It just said only 5% was restored. May be it also include my memory card and I haven't insert my memory card back. But I had deselected "backup memory card" when I was doing my backup couple days ago. Anyway, it's the simplest, free software afterward and almost gurantee (almost?) that it works. I don't know. It's Nokia after all.

So, the phone was all back to last time it was. Honestly, this is quite good, at least I don't have to setup this and that again. Even my customized font is there too. So, time to sleep.

Visit at Nokia Care

As posted in my primiary blog, my Nokia N70 broke down recently. The display is mess up, showing nothing but dizzy, just like a TV with antenna unplugged.

So, first thing first. I backup its data immediately, using PC Suite (free download from www.nokia.com). For such a slow, lengthy yet important task, I use the CA-53 data cable. It should be more reliable, stable and faster than other means (bluetooth, infrared). The backup program will copy most information and allow me to restore to N70 (same model) at a later time. It took me 250 MB harddisk space just to backup the N70 which has only 20 MB of data. And the program cannot backup my Contact. Anyway, my contact are synchronized thur Outlook (may be that's the reason?) and I'm not worrying about that.

Using Phone Browser in File Explorer also allow you to backup/restore contact. Just drag-and-drop.

My phone is covered by the extended warranty now. If not, I would have to pay couple hundreds to a thousands to replace the LCD. To extended the warranty, one must be a member of Club Nokia (HK) and register his phone on the website.

Here is what i found after meeting the customer service:
1. they will give you everything back, except the phone body. any removable things, including the back-cover, will return to you
2. they won't help you do backup.
3. they kept my invoice.
4. they spent 5 minutes to verify my membership and extended warranty.

My membership card is just a print-out of an image on website, with my membership info. Since it's just a piece of paper, I always keep it in wallet.

By the way, they said that replacing the case is HK$380 for N70. May be I can get the whole black color, just like the "Music Edition".

Mac X... XP

I had strengthened my Macintosh recently. After migrating part of songs from old PC to Mac and installing the printer, now I am trying to run Windows inside the Mac. Of course, I do not want to leave the Mac OS X environment nor partition-ing the harddisk into two. So, the only solution is to run a virtual PC inside Mac OS. Since my iMac is Intel-based (Core 2 Duo), it is just perfect to run without a big overhead or much performance trade-off.

Third party application is needed to install a virtual PC. There is no free lunch (Boot Camp? No way). Besides the outdated Virtual PC by Microsoft (they haven't support the Intel-Mac yet, AFAIK), other choices would be Parallels and Q(emu). I've installed both applications. On Parallels, I created a 8GB harddisk with 256 MB ram. I installed a full version Windows XP Pro (no SP) on it. On Q(emu), I created a 4GB harddisk with 256 MB ram. For this one, I tried the mini-XP ISO version. Install using ISO file is a lot faster than using the CD (and less noisy). Since the two installations are too much different, I cannot compare them yet. So far, base on my observation on the Windows, I found that Parallels are stronger than Q(emu). Of course, they also differ in the price - Parallels costs HK$630 while Q costs nothing.

Epson EPL-5900L on iMac

After researching HDMI-to-DVI-D cable online for an hour last night, I suddenly wanted to connect my Epson EPL-5900L printer to the Mac. Dann, it spent me over 2 hours without success. I tried the default drivers as well as the Power PC version from official Epson HK website. The printer just sits there and doing nothing, no response, total silent.

This is just impossible/unbelieveable that this simple laser printer cannot work with the latest Mac OS. Therefore, I keep searching again this morning. Finally, I were here, at the Epson UK website. I found the drivers for Power PC (again). But this time I also found a link: "Epson and Mac Intel". Bingo! Here is the page with the correct driver. This one, compare with the Power PC 34MB, is 86MB. Well, it is quite a large driver compare with those Windows versions. Anyway, who cares now? To use a Mac, you won't care about thing like this anymore. You just have to keep devoting money to Apple for the rest of your life.

Anyway, now I can print stuff using EPL-5900L on my Macintosh. Oh, the Epson monitor also works too, telling me that it is time to replace the cartridge (toner). Oh well, I've a spare one since day-1 already. The current one is 3000-page and the spare one is 6000-page. Probably can last for 10 years.

Sync a PC with Mac

Time to get more and more a "Mac guy" now. Tonight, I watched the Keynote which Steve Jobs demostrating the "whole new", "5 years ahead" iPhone. Well, I think he is more like an actor on the stage than just to introduce a cool, new, ahead-of-the-age product.

Thou not too late, I'm also connecting my old iPod (20 GB second generation iPod) and synchronizing it with the iTunes, which I has transferred around 50% of my library from PC to it. So, music can be sync with iPod and Mac. What about contact and calendar? How can I sync my PC laptop with the Mac desktop? How to sync them while they are at separate locations and might not be turn on both at the same time? First of all, let's sync everything on the PC inside the M$ Outlook first. Connect Pocket PC (or Windows Mobile), Nokia phones (you know I've two) and any others(?) and have them all sync-ed first. Bring one of the phone supported by iSync, which is my Nokia N70 and sync it with Mac. Eventually, "Boom!", my iPod would also get sync-ed via Address Book and iCalendar.

What a "great technology"!

My First PPC App

Due to a project requirement, one of our teammate is working on Windows Mobile application. He borrowed some reference books from the Library. So I just take this chance to learn the eMbedded Visual C++, which I tried many years ago without success.

Following the example, I wrote half of a dummy calculator which does nothing more but inputing number and allow overflow to happens. It can run on my Asus A600 (Pocket PC 2002) and Acer n300 (Windows Mobile 5) with different screen resolution. However, the example didn't mention how to finish it, nor I've the mood to write up the remains code myself. So the dummy calculator is really... dumb.

Anyway. I also pick up a piece of useful information from the book: set the low battery alert from Settings page. By modifying the Default value of "\HKCU\ControlPanel\Notifications\{A877D663-239C-47a7-9304-0D347F580408}", set Default = "Low battery alert", one can access the settings under "Sounds & Notification".

Speed on Bluetooth

A mini-stat I found recently, the lower bound of Bluetooth is 24KBps, and its upper bound is 78KBps. Can it be anything faster?

New laptop? Don't be silly, don't be sor.

I always keep an eye at the "Lenovo China (Hong Kong S.A.R.) - Special offers - ThinkPad" website. Newer laptops with faster CPU and better configure, and lower price than my T42. Sigh... but my T42 has been serving me and helping me for a year and half already. The only issues it suffer are the small harddisk (40 GB harddisk = 36 GB after format, and 3 GB goes to a recovery drive, only around 27 GB is usable by me) and lack of Bluetooth connectivity. Of course, it would be great to have a build-in card reader but this can be solved easily. At least a card reader does not create trouble as if the Belkin Bluetooth doogle, or should I say the Bluetooth software?

Anyway chance to replace? Always feel sorry to my T42 if I replaced it by T60. But, upgrade possible? PCMCIA Bluetooth? PCMCIA SD card reader? Will T42 run better after upgrade? The first problem come up in my mind is the stability and the second the power consume when on DC.

Well...

C drive? E drive? or... D drive!

On Nokia Series 60 phones, there are two memory types for user to choose from, namely as "Phone Memory" (C drive) and "Memory Card" (E drive). Mostly, users should install applications and copy data to memory card, so that they can reserve as much phone memory as possible for other purposes, such as receiving messages. On the other hand, developers will install applications on phone memory, due to lack of expensive memory cards in stock. Thus, users might experiencing something very different, which the developers have ever thought of.

I discovered this tonight, when I tried to develop a program with my E50. Being a developer and a user, I knew that installing application on memory card is far more safe than on phone memory. Not to mention that I want to reserve more phone memory too. At least, if anything goes wrong, I can format the memory card easily with a card reader, while phone memory is hard to clean up. Using the card helps me discover a problem of using memory card: it's 20 times slower than the phone memory.

My application will import some data on first start up. The database it generated is only 67KB. It took less than 3 seconds to generate on emulator, around 27 seconds on phone memory, and nearly 8 minutes on memory card! However, it's quite sure that users will install their applications on memory card 90% of time. What to do? I've try to optimize the importing process, which eventually I'd introduced some memory leak within (I knew they are unclosed database view, but haven't locate and fix all). For nearly 5 hours I was struggling with this damn, slow memory card (both Eagle Tech 256MB and SanDisk 64MB are slow). Well, yes, I also struggled with sleepiness. Finally, I've a solution come up in mind, a lightning solution which might do thing in a flash!

1. copy the orginal database to the D drive, the RAM disk on phone (Yeah, S60 phone has a ram disk, can you believe it?)
2. do the importing on the RAM disk.
3. copy the final file back to the place it came from.

But this mean quite a lot of re-do work now. No sleep...

My Mac goes Wireless

I spent two full days to get my iMac online using AirPort but without success. Finally I gave up and use cable. However, ocasionally the Mac will unable to connect to Internet. I will have to unplug and replug the cable several times before it can hookup again.

Tonight, I used miniStat2 widgets to connect via AirPort, accidentally. It is a monitoring program, in Dashboard. Actually, I seldom use them, except when I try to set up an alarm clock at the ProdMe 0.7b. But I ain't sure why it can make connection possible. A mircale, anyway.

While using Mac

I am going to list some problems I'm current facing when using my Mac, as well as great software I found.

Problems:

1. Must install OpenVanilla for my one-and-only-one Chinese input method, Dayi.
2. OpenVanilla's Dayi works in NeoOffice Writer (Word) but not Calc (Excel)
3. home and end keys do not act same as in Windows.
   

Great software:

1. VirtueDesktop
2. You Control: Tunes
3. Adium
4. Microsoft Messenger 6.0.1 for Mac (the latest update is quite okay, at least it can display others' emotion icons)

Hints:

1. To install Open Office 2.0, must install X11 first. To install X11, insert the Installer Disc 1 that come with Mac, select Optional Installs and select customize. (details)
   

List shall go on.

Naming My Devices

In computer world, every device can have a name for identification. Naming them one by one has been a headache to me. Most of the time I just use their model number. Sometime will added my name with it. But sometime I would give them a better name.

falcon - the second desktop built by me. This name was first used in a file server from the first company I worked for. Furthermore, I was using falconer somewhere for something before, which I had now forgot. A funny thing about this computer is that, I picked the slowest P4 CPU available in the market, rather than a fastest one.

dolphin - Buffalo LinkStation is a 250GB LAN disk I bought for backup purpose. I tried to pick names of animal species, to match with falcon. "D" for data and "D" for dolphin.

swallow - I borrowed Sunny's CPU-onboard computer for some time (now returned). This computer won't start up if installed memory is over 64 MB RAM.

Penguin - for my white and black Nokia E50.

Hawk - during reinstalling the Bluetooth software on my second laptop, IBM ThinkPad T42, I gave it a new name. This comes from black hawk (in Chinese) as T42 has black body.


I want to rename my white iMac and black Nokia N70 if possible, but don't have any good names to represent them. iMac is white...... may be... polarbear? And Owl for the black N70?

iBackup for Mac (2)

Pure Mac: Backup - Software for Macintosh is the original website where I found the link to iBackup. You might also find other interesting software for Macintosh there.


I've been using the iBackup for half a month. However, I run the backup a few times only. Sigh, my work is killing me. Anyway.

As someone has reported problem with non-Mac partitions, I tried to run a small set of backup before. It seems that if the backup destination is FAT partition (my Buffalo DiskStation 250 GB USB harddisk come as FAT16 by default), iBackup cannot be smart enough to not overwrite already exist files. Luckily that it shows a complete log on screen and save as log file for users to analysis. Because of this, I've reformatted my DiskStation to Mac OS format (which took me some time to do so).

So far, iBackup works as I expected, although the duration is quite long. Existed and unchanged backup-ed files are no longer being copied. This would save some writing time. However, it takes a long time to do comparison, which unlike Windows which use a flag in file to identify whether the files was backup/updated. Well, may be this is because the backup in Windows is built into the OS, while the one for Mac isn't.

Due to this, the iBackup sometimes appears hang when compare folders with large files (such as the Movies folder). If you have enough trust on the software and if you have over 100GB of data to backup, please run it while you will be away for hours. Last time it took me 3 hours to update my 120GB backup set with less than 2GB of new data.