This morning I woke up and opened my laptop to find this:

What the…? What do I even say when I call in to AppleCare? “It looks like my computer zoomed in on the letters ‘n dun’ and won’t zoom out? And then the screen freaked out on me?”

I’m sure they love such detailed complaints. But really, what else do you call this?

I was able to see the cursor, and clearly things were changing on the screen. Can you see the dock? Lovely, isn’t it? I pressed the power key in hopes that I could get it to restart instead of just killing the power, but too many programs were open, and I’m assuming it was asking me if I wanted to save all of it. Yes. I do. But I can’t seeeeee you.

I should mention that this is my second Macbook Pro, the first one having been replaced by Apple after I started to have a better relationship with the AppleCare support techs than with my own family.

I’d been thinking about upgrading to 4gigs of RAM, but now I’m worried that I’d have to keep the old RAM around for fear of some loon at the Green Hills Genius Bar accusing all my woes on the third-party RAM.

From what I’ve heard, this is the state of Apple products now. I’ve got friends who still have old Powerbooks and iBooks and have never had a single problems. What’s the deal with Apple’s Quality Control. How much do they test their new products? Or is the obsession with releasing new, smokin’ gadgets before anyone’s even heard of them causing Apple to relax their standards? PLEASE, Steve, I beg of you– the reason we all love Apple so much is because they’re not supposed to be a hassle. They’re supposed to “just work.” But it looks like the new era of Apple, Inc. means generation after generation of faulty computer products. Get with the program, Apple.

1. The Mac MiniThis is the big one, the center of it all. I went with the Mini for several reasons: 
   1. Media ServerMy Macbook Pro is great, but I got mine a year ago– back before Apple upped the storage capacity in their laptops to 250 gigs. Mine has a measly 100 gigs. (Seriously? More than doubling the capacity in just a year? Wow.) And I’d like to have a place to not only store all my music and video, it would be great to be able to play them on the big screen with the great speakers.I also want to be able to sync my laptop with the media server for everything but videos (I’ll just keep the tv shows and movies on the Mini), but I’ll show you how to do that later.
   2. Backup ServerThis was one of my reasons for purchasing the Mini, but for now it doesn’t look like it matters. In the months before OS X Leopard was released, Apple had advertised that the new Time Machine backup application would be able to perform backups wirelessly (as long as the drive was HFS+ formatted and communicating over the network via Apple Filing Protocol). Apple yanked that feature from Time Machine shortly before launch. There’s still the possibility that the feature will come with a future update, but there are no guarantees.Here was why the Mini was crucial: there really are only two ways to meet the requirements of both HFS+ and AFP with network attached storage. There are some NAS server solutions that allow you to format the drive HFS+, and some others that allow the Apple Filing Protocol to be used, but only one that does both. Apple’s Airport Extreme. But that’s a pretty expensive router, and I already have a solid router that’s given me very little trouble. The only other option is to just share an HFS+ drive on another Mac. Hence the Mini. (Certainly too expensive if that’s all I was buying it for, but given all the uses the Mini has, I think it’s worth it.)
   3. Print ServerBasically, I hated always being in the living room when I needed to print something and having to walk into my bedroom, connect the USB hub, print one page, and then eject the three harddrives that are also attached to the hub. I just connected the printer to the Mini and shared it. Bingo.
   4. TiVo AlternativeDefinitely the biggest reason I got the Mini. Don’t get me wrong, I love being enslaved to Comcast’s lackluster performace and more-than-impressive monthly bill. But something about the possibility of an endless supply of storage for tv show recordings, the ability to export them to iPod/iPhone format, and the ability to watch them anywhere in the world really caught my attention. Meet elgato’s line of eyetv devices. I’ve got the EyeTV 250, the predecessor to the EyeTV 250 Plus. I can receive any of the analog channels from the standard cable package. It’s a great system, but there’s still room for improvement. I’ll review it soon in a separate post. I’ll just say that I’m impressed, I hope more features will come soon, but I’m not yet ready to ditch the DVR box we rent from Comcast.
2. EyeTV 250The second biggest piece to the puzzle, and I’ve already mentioned it above. I won’t go into much detail, that’s for another post. Basically mine accepts analog channels. The updated EyeTV 250 Plus also accepts over-the-air HDTV (called ATSC, the HD equivalent to the classic “rabbit ears” setup). EyeTV also packages their software with the HDHomeRun, a dual-tuner that accepts both over-the-air HDTV and cable-based HDTV (called Clear QAM).
3. Buffalo WHR-G54SI like this router because it’s both cheap (you can find it for $30-50) and potentially powerful. I flashed it with the much more powerful DD-WRT, which allows more options in the configuration. Recently Buffalo even teamed up with DD-WRT to release an officially supported, pre-flashed version of this router. There are definitely more options for the super-user. It even pings the DynDNS server to let them know you’re current WAN IP. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry. It’s definitely a nerd feature you’d just need if you wanted to watch all those TV shows anywhere with Internet access.

 It seems I’m not alone. Randy over at Ditching Cable is currently involved in a very similar experiment, trying to rid himself of the over-priced, under-performance that most of the monopolistic cable companies bring to the table. 

Anyway, I thought it’d be a great time to test the Time Machine backup system. I had a backup to the Time Machine disk in case there were still issues with the Time Machine restores, but it seemed to restore everything perfectly. That is, until I tried to load back up some websites yesterday. Since then, I have spent probably 12 hours trying to figure out why http://localhost/ and http://127.0.0.1/ came up in Safari as if the server were off. Well, that’s because it never started, and here’s why…

Time Machine, for whatever reason, did not restore a crucial folder that Apache needs to write its error logs. Specifically, it’s the folder /private/var/log/apache2. If you’re having this same problem, open up Console and notice the errors popping up. Apache’s trying to start up, and it halts everytime with an error that looks something like this:

11/29/07 4:00:22 PM org.apache.httpd[1257] (2)No such file or directory: httpd: could not open error log file /private/var/log/apache2/error_log.

Anyway, the fix is simple. Open up Terminal and type this:

sudo mkdir /private/var/log/apache2

You’re welcome.

As far as viruses go, this one seems pretty tame. Technically, it’s not even a virus. It’s a trojan. Very low risk. I don’t even think it’s around anymore. It utilized a very specific vulnerability in iChat to distribute itself, and only on Intel-based Macs, but there were less than 50 known infections.

According to Mac360:

The two known examples of Trojans, (Leap-A and Oompa-Loompa), required the user to accept and download a compressed zip file, open it, and double click on the file inside, then type their password in order for their Macs to be compromised. This is not a ‘well written’ trojan, but a simple matter of Social Engineering, fooling the end user with a promise of something for free.

So, 114,000 for Windows, still 0 for OS X.

Update: Here’s a new one at DMiessler. And a good explanation for the major difference between this kind of threat for OS X and viruses for Windows.

Archive Mailbox
Create an archive of your mailbox to back up important messages or to transfer your mail to another computer.

Yeah, so you can create an archive of your mail. But Apple doesn’t use a proprietary archiving method. This actually is just a simple export to the standard mbox format. Woo!

In Tiger, the previous version of OS X, Apple switched from using the mbox format–which stores emails in one monstrous file–to a single-email-per-file system using an emlx extension so that Spotlight could search the emails individually. But this also left people wanting to switch from Tiger’s mail (or simply backup their emails) out in the cold rain. Nearly every other email system uses the mbox format, so you’d have to employ the dodgy method of converting emlx to mbox with Cosmic Soft’s aptly named emlx to mbox converter. It worked. Uh… sometimes. There were always gitches.

It’s nice to see this unannounced feature in Leopard Mail!

do shell script "/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/mampp start" user name "YourUserName” password “YourPassword” with administrator privileges

Of course, replace YourUserName with your OS X username and replace YourPassword with the respective password.

Save the script as an application (through the Save As… menu), and in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items, include the new little application you just made. (I also chose to hide mine. It shouldn’t really matter, once the application is finished running, it quits.) It’ll start XAMPP upon startup, and of course, shutting down your computer will automatically stop the XAMPP server. You’re welcome.

If you didn’t really understand most of this little tutorial, then you probably shouldn’t be messing with XAMPP anyhow.

If anyone knows how to run a shell command at startup without going through AppleScript, please let me know. I’m sure it’s possible, I’m just not skilled enough to figure it out on my own.

Basically, it’s gonna make things much smoother. And here’s an unannounced bonus to Gmail with IMAP…

Goodbye GMail Loader!
For some time, folks have been cooking up ways to get their entire email archive into the Gmail web interface. Why? I don’t know, maybe for archive purposes? Maybe so we don’t have to worry about keeping copies in our old mail program? Let’s face it, if you really want to keep all your old emails, it’s much easier to have them all within the same interface so you don’t have to go hunting around between the several different email programs you used to use and the webmail you now use. It simplifies the search.

In case you didn’t know, you can literally just drag an email from your local folders to the IMAP folders inside Mail.app. It will copy that email, with sent and received dates intact, to the server as if it had always been there. It solves the timestamp issue that the GMail Loader encountered. With the GMail Loader, you can get all your old emails uploaded to Gmail’s servers, but they would show up in the interface list as if they’d just arrived (because it had… it had just arrived on the Gmail servers). When reading the email itself, it would show the actual sent date. Kind of an ugly problem.

Something else I’ve noticed. The way Gmail interacts with IMAP is strange, mostly due to the unorthodox “label” method that Google designed for Gmail instead of folders. Since messages could have more than one label applied, that translates to having the appearance of being in more than one folder inside your IMAP client (obviously I use mail.app). So when you delete a message from one of the IMAP “folders” you are really just removing the label from the message. That is, unless you’ve opted to have your IMAP client store deleted messages on the server (instead of using a local trash bin on the computer).

This is why Google recommends you don’t select that option. It ruins the ability to remove labels from your messages because then when you delete a message, it actually deletes the message. (They’d also like me to not select ‘Store Junk Messages on Server’, but frankly, I’ve not found a bug in letting mail.app work hand-in-hand with the Spam label/folder on Gmail’s servers.)

Of course, if you’re not going to use the Gmail labeling scheme, selecting this option would make your IMAP client behave more like you’d expect. Anyway, just something I thought about, tested, and confirmed.

I got tired of using the somewhat lackluster search function within the forum some time ago, and I’ve been getting much better results using Google to search that site specifically. But it would be nice to have a Firefox/IE7 search plugin to allow me to search straight from the browser, non? Good thing I made one.

Click here to install.

Obviously I’m simplifying things, but it just makes more sense. Because when the wireless providers have a lock on the devices they allow on their network, they subsidize them. And they lock features out. And then they add those same features back in a new and improved clunky, proprietary format for the low, low monthly price of…!

Prime example: lately I’ve been looking at getting a new phone. It’s about that time, and now that I’m no longer in school, my schedule is far less than routine. Essentially, I just need a phone with a calendar. But I already keep my entire schedule in iCal on my Macbook Pro. So I want my phone to sync the calendar and address book (it doesn’t have to sync anything else as far as I’m concerned). Ask a Verizon wireless sales associate this, and they’ll readily reply that yes, their phones can do that. But not all. Check out this list of phones on Apple’s website to see which ones are denoted with (5) to indicate…

Why just Verizon’s version? Could that be because they lock their phones down beyond what any other carrier attempts?

So instead of working towards letting us use the awesome technological features that Motorola and LG have heavily advertised (Bluetooth isn’t only for hands-free headsets, Verizon), the U.S. wireless providers treat customers with contempt, acting like watching television on a 1.5-inch by 1.5-inch screen is what really gets my wireless heart a-thumpin’.

Hopefully this news on the Congressional debate will turn into much better news later on.