B12 Solipsism

Dan Frakes reports on the recent Apple, Inc. shareholder meeting:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple’s environmental record and policies occupied a good chunk of the Q&A discussion. Apple took advantage of several shareholder questions to tout the company’s recent report on supplier sustainability (available on the Apple Website). Jobs claimed that Apple is the first company to work directly with suppliers on issues such as environmental impact and worker education and protection. Taking a jab at other companies, as well as organizations such as Greenpeace, he noted that “other companies just make promises” and attend conferences and events to “schmooze with [environmental groups], but the work ain’t getting done,” whereas Apple is actually taking steps to improve the company’s real-world green credentials and treatment of workers. Tim Cook added that Apple audited more than 100 suppliers in 2009, and more than half of those reported that they’d never been audited by a company other than Apple.

Similarly, in response to a comment that being green is also good for business, Jobs agreed, noting that by decreasing the size of product boxes, Apple has reduced the number of 747 cargo flights needed each year by the hundreds. “It’s the right thing to do from an environmental point of view; it’s the right thing to do from a business point of view.” Jobs also claimed that Apple is the leader in its industry when it comes to recycling, reducing toxins, smaller packaging, and workers’ rights.

(One shareholder, who had previously in the meeting spoken out against the two shareholder proposals, made the claim that global warming isn’t a serious issue and asked why Apple resigned its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over green policies. Jobs replied, “I guess we have a difference of opinion.”)

[Click to continue reading Apple focuses on green at shareholder meeting | Mac | Macworld]

Good for Apple, really. And Jobs is correct, there are a lot of corporations that play up their “green” credentials, but aren’t really very environmentally conscious.

bonus for grins:

As usual, there were also a number of off-beat comments and questions, ranging from suggestions that Apple invest in Tesla Motors (Jobs: “We were thinking of a toga party, actually”)

…

Perhaps the most thoughtful response of the day came when a woman wondered about the biggest challenges the company sees going forward, asking Jobs, “What keeps you up at night?”

“Shareholder meetings,” Jobs quickly quipped, before giving the meeting a cold splash of reality.

“Apple requires stability in the world. People aren’t going to worry about which laptop to buy if they can’t afford dinner, can’t afford to send their kids to school, can’t afford textbooks. There are things much bigger than us that are out of our control. So we try to just do the best we can.”

“His Sun Years” (Johnny Cash)

Hello, I’m (downloading) Johnny Cash¹

The lucky recipient of a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card (and a whole lot of press) is 71-year-old Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia —a retired real estate agent, onetime Navy radar operator, and grandfather of nine who just wanted Johnny Cash’s 1958 single “Guess Things Happen That Way” for his new Nano, a birthday gift from his children. And he bought it on a PC: “I do not own a Mac, no,” he chuckles. “I knew somebody was going to ask me that question.”

Sulcer has spent the last day fielding calls from, among others, Apple head Steve Jobs (“I thought it was my son, he’s always a joker. I kept saying, ‘Come on, Kevin, I know it’s you!”) and Cash’s daughter Rosanne (“she had her husband, who is her guitarist, play the song to me over the phone. That was real nice.”).

He has been a devoted Johnny Cash fan for most of his life, he says: “I went to Georgia Tech on a football scholarship, broke just about every bone in my body. All those boys on the team, we just loved country music… My whole life, I had never understood why people go see movies twice, but I’ve seen [Cash biopic] Walk the Line four times. My kids finally bought me the DVD. And I was pretty sure I had all of his music, but I was just checking iTunes, listening to those little 20 or 30 second clips, and I found this one. It has some good pickin’ in it!”

[Click to continue reading EW talks to the Georgia grandfather who bought the 10 billionth song on itunes: 'I've never won anything!' | EW.com]

A sweet story, really. The song itself is pretty typical for a Sun Records Johnny Cash song; also there’s a version floating around the intertubes that is a duet with Bob Dylan, circa Nashville Skyline.

from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Jobs congratulated him, thanked him for using Apple products and chatted a bit.

“He was real nice,” Sulcer said. “I told him I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed iTunes and the iPod. I really enjoy country music.

“He asked me if I played the guitar, and I said, ‘Oh my goodness. That is my lifelong frustration.’ “

Sulcer has been trying to learn the picking style of Luther Perkins, Cash’s guitarist, but he has not had much luck.

“[Jobs] said he had been messing around a little with [the guitar], too,” Sulcer said.

…

Later Thursday, after his doctor appointment, Sulcer was expecting calls from near and far. Apple public relations people have been calling him to ask whether he would consent to an interview with Rolling Stone, the rock magazine, and other publications.

“I said, ‘Rolling Stone is going to be so disappointed with this old man.’ “

He did get a call he found a little more special. “Rosanne Cash also called this morning to thank me for listening to Johnny Cash,” Sulcer said. She told Sulcer her father would have turned 78 on Friday. Then she had one more surprise for him: Her husband, musician John Leventhal, played the song he bought over the phone for him.

[Click to continue reading Woodstock man wins $10,000 iTunes contest | ajc.com]

Too funny

1. famous opening line of his live At Folsom Prison LP, prior to singing Folsom Prison Blues – shot a man in Reno just to see him die, wild cheers from the inmates, you remember [↩]

Some additional reading January 28th from 18:37 to 21:45:

• Hands-on with the Apple iPad – it does make sense :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Andy Ihnatko – The display is gorgeous — crisp, with strong color but lots of subtlety. A pro photographer friend with a best-selling photobook series told me he thought it was good enough to use as a commercial presentation portfolio
• iPad About « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry – I have always thought Hans Christian Andersen should have written a companion piece to the Emperor’s New Clothes, in which everyone points at the Emperor shouting, in a Nelson from the Simpson’s voice, “Ha ha! He’s naked.” And then a lone child pipes up, ‘No. He’s actually wearing a really fine suit of clothes.” And they all clap hands to their foreheads as they realise they have been duped into something worse than the confidence trick, they have fallen for what E. M. Forster called the lack of confidence trick. How much easier it is to distrust, to doubt, to fold the arms and say “Not impressed”. I’m not advocating dumb gullibility, but it is has always amused me that those who instinctively dislike Apple for being apparently cool, trendy, design fixated and so on are the ones who are actually so damned cool and so damned sensitive to stylistic nuance that they can’t bear to celebrate or recognise obvious class, beauty and desire.
• Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – Justice Alito's conduct and the Court's credibility – There's a reason that Supreme Court Justices — along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff — never applaud or otherwise express any reaction at a State of the Union address. It's vital — both as a matter of perception and reality — that those institutions remain apolitical, separate and detached from partisan wars. The Court's pronouncements on (and resolutions of) the most inflammatory and passionate political disputes retain legitimacy only if they possess a credible claim to being objectively grounded in law and the Constitution, not political considerations. The Court's credibility in this regard has — justifiably — declined substantially over the past decade, beginning with Bush v. Gore (where 5 conservative Justices issued a ruling ensuring the election of a Republican President), followed by countless 5-4 decisions in which conservative Justices rule in a way that promotes GOP political beliefs, while the more "liberal" Justices do to the reverse

A few interesting links collected January 26th through January 27th:

• Stop CBS From Airing Anti-Abortion Super Bowl Ad « Majority Speaks – Even as the trial continues for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, CBS is planning to air an anti-abortion ad during the Super Bowl game.

  Tell CBS that this is no time to feed the anger and hatred of anti-abortion extremists.

  CBS has a stated policy to reject all ads it deems controversial, including ads from MoveOn.org, PETA, and even the United Church of Christ, which dared to suggest that their church would model tolerance (“Jesus Didn’t Turn People Away. Neither Do We”).

  In fact, CBS execs told the United Church of Christ that CBS rejects any ad that “touches on and/or takes a position on one side of a current issue

• Can Apple’s iPad Save the Media After All? | Epicenter | Wired.com – early reports indicate that device’s display is crisp, with rich colors. If that’s the case, it will make any well-designed, high-quality publication look good. In addition, magazine publishers can take advantage of the device’s ability to play video by embedding it into articles, and can update their publications with the latest news in real time…

  Condé Nast is preparing a number of iPad ezine subscriptions, including GQ, Wired and Vanity Fair, sources tell wired.com. In an interview before the iPad announcement one senior executive said that while the company it was still very enthusiastic about the iPhone platform — whose downloads already count towards ad-rate-setting circulation guarantees — but was poised to take full advantage of the iPad and was “eager to see what kind of additional functionality they have they baked in.”

  Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/can-apples-ipad-save-the-media-after-all#ixzz0dr25Jr9C

• 1.2 Million Pounds Of Cured Meat Recalled For Salmonella – The Consumerist – "1.2 million pounds of Daniele International salami, sausage, and other cured meat products have been yanked out of stores and recalled due to possible salmonella contamination. The meats are linked to 184 sick individuals in 38 states. At least 35 people have been hospitalized, but none have died."

  Pippy is (internet) famous, again!

I’ve been having entirely too much fun with the Hipstamatic iPhone application¹. I’ve taken over two hundred snapshots in the first 48 hours²: a pace that probably won’t last, but for now, I’m enthusiastically exploring the capabilities of the camera.

Turns out there was an actual plastic 35 mm camera called the Hipstamatic, with an interesting back story. The inventors are unfortunately deceased³, but their older brother has created a blog to tell their story, and the story of the iPhone app.

Founders: Bruce and Winston Dorbowski
Founded: November 1982 (Unofficially, as in no lawyers)
Location: Merrill, Wisconsin, USA

The Idea: Bring people a camera that cost less than the film. Bruce had a Russian plastic camera that our father gave him as a Christmas gift in 1972. The camera had since broke and was no longer being made or sold, at least anywhere he could find it. So Bruce and Winston came up with a plan to recreate something similar. Winston had fallen in love with his Kodak Instamatic and that was the start of the Hipstamatic.

Camera Specs
Model: 100
Material: Plastic Body, Plastic Lens
Produced: 1982-84
Type: View finder camera
Lens: Hipsta A1
Film: 35mm
Picture Size: 28mm x 28mm
Original Cost: $8.25
Focus: Automatic
Aperture: 2.8
Flash: hot shoe

[Click to continue reading The Great Hipstamatic 100]

I never owned my own Hipstamatic, but the iPhone app seems like a pretty good simulacrum, even going so far as to force you to use a tiny little viewfinder to frame your shot.

the camera takes a second to warm up (well, at least it pretends to be warming up the transistors), also ‘turning on the flash’ takes a few moments. Can’t take rapid-fire photos, in other words. I’ve missed a few shots because of this, but I suppose it’s part of the game, yo. And since there is no flash on an iPhone, I’m guessing turning on the flash just adds a bit of randomly controlled coloration to the image.

changing lens, film, flash is as easy as a swipe of the finger…

My other complaint about the application is that the cost doesn’t include some extras like this film, for instance. The application could have been priced a couple of dollars more and included. Not that big of a deal really, mostly annoyed me because my iPhone password is fairly robust and includes a lot of typing, numbers, capital letters, etc. I bet the $1.99 initial price spurs sales though.

Once your image has been “developed”, you can either email it, or upload it to Facebook. I’m happy with these options, as I usually upload iPhone snapshots to Flickr via the email-to-Twitter option. Alternatively, the image is saved in your iPhone photo library for you to sync to your computer or whatever else you normally would do. I chose to email via the Hipstamatic application interface as Hipstamatic then records what lens, film, flash is used⁴

I have bought a few other iPhone camera apps⁵, none have been nearly as much fun to use as The Great Hipstamatic.

1. available here, if you have an iPhone that is [↩]
2. though only uploaded a handful [↩]
3. killed entirely too young by a drunk driver [↩]
4. for instance, the photo at the top of the page used Lens: John S / Film: Float /Flash: Off. [↩]
5. Best Camera and CameraBag are the two I’ve used the most [↩]

A few interesting links collected December 9th through December 10th:

• From the Desk of David Pogue – Free Speech (Recognition) – NYTimes.com – Remember the Gmail brouhaha? … At the time, everyone was hysterical about the supposed privacy violation: Google will be reading my e-mail! Of course, no humans were looking at your e-mail. It was just a bunch of servers analyzing keywords. Today, everybody’s forgotten all about it. But now the issue rises again with Dragon Dictation.

  As for the names in your Contacts: they’re sent to Nuance so that the app will recognize the names when you dictate them. No other information (phone numbers, e-mail, addresses, etc.) is transmitted.

  What I don’t understand is: Why don’t these same people worry that Verizon or AT&T is listening in to their cellphone calls every single day? Why don’t they worry that MasterCard is peeking into their buying habits? How do they know Microsoft and Apple aren’t slurping down private documents off the hard drive and laughing their heads off?

  I mean, if you’re gonna be paranoid, at least be rational about it.

• 

• Jon22 » today’s grammar lesson: rob enderle – Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.

• 

• Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly | Electronic Frontier Foundation – privacy option telling Facebook to “not share any information about me through the Facebook API.”

  That option has disappeared, and now apps can get all of your “publicly available information” whenever a friend of yours adds an app.

  Facebook defends this change by arguing that very few users actually ever selected that option — in the same breath that they talk about how complicated and hard to find the previous privacy settings were. Rather than eliminating the option, Facebook should have made it more prominent and done a better job of publicizing it. Instead, the company has sent a clear message: if you don’t want to share your personal data with hundreds or even thousands of nameless, faceless Facebook app developers — some of whom are obviously far from honest — then you shouldn’t use Facebook.

Seems like my MacBook Pro hard drive has given up the ghost. Disk errors and the like. Three years of moderate use, but death can strike at any time to anyone, or any thing. Now I have to ascertain if there is any unbacked-up data on the drive that is worth the hassle of retrieving.

I am pretty good about keeping backups current, but I was out of town, and had family camping out in my office so there is a potential gap there of a couple weeks. Maybe.

Half the battle of repairing computers is simply having the patience to be methodical and logical, and waiting for processes to finish.

I know I shouldn’t take machine failure personally, but I do. This laptop was a birthday present a few years ago, and it has travelled with me all over the place.

Speaking of Heathkits, Steve Jobs had them as well…

I got to know this man, whose name was Larry Lang [of Hewlett-Packard], and he taught me a lot of electronics. He was great. He used to build Heathkits. Heathkits were really great. Heathkits were these products that you would buy in kit form. You actually paid more money for them than if you just went and bought the finished product if it was available. These Heathkits would come with these detailed manuals about how to put this thing together and all the parts would be laid out in a certain way and color coded. You’d actually build this thing yourself. I would say that this gave one several things. It gave one a understanding of what was inside a finished product and how it worked because it would include a theory of operation but maybe even more importantly it gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe. These things were not mysteries anymore. I mean you looked at a television set you would think that “I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits so I could build that.” Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment that one had no knowledge of their interiors. It gave a tremendous level of self-confidence, that through exploration and learning one could understand seemingly very complex things in one’s environment. My childhood was very fortunate in that way.

[Click to continue reading Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Steve Jobs]

I skipped second grade, which I’m sure altered me in some ineffable manner. I’m happy with who I am, but of course, wonder what I would have been like if I hadn’t been younger than most kids in my grade up until I was in college. Apparently Steve Jobs skipped ahead too

SJ: School was pretty hard for me at the beginning. My mother taught me how to read before I got to school and so when I got there I really just wanted to do two things. I wanted to read books because I loved reading books and I wanted to go outside and chase butterflies. You know, do the things that five year olds like to do. I encountered authority of a different kind than I had ever encountered before, and I did not like it. And they really almost got me. They came close to really beating any curiosity out of me. By the time I was in third grade, I had a good buddy of mine, Rick Farentino, and the only way we had fun was to create mischief. I remember we traded everybody. There was a big bike rack where everybody put their bikes, maybe a hundred bikes in this rack, and we traded everybody our lock combinations for theirs on an individual basis and then went out one day and put everybody’s lock on everybody else’s bike and it took them until about ten o’clock that night to get all the bikes sorted out. We set off explosives in teacher’s desks. We got kicked out of school a lot.

In fourth grade I encountered one of the other saints of my life. They were going to put Rick Farentino and I into the same fourth grade class, and the principal said at the last minute “No, bad idea. Separate them.” So this teacher, Mrs. Hill, said “I’ll take one of them.” She taught the advanced fourth grade class and thank God I was the random one that got put in the class. She watched me for about two weeks and then approached me. She said “Steven, I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a deal. I have this math workbook and if you take it home and finish on your own without any help and you bring it back to me, if you get it 80% right, I will give you five dollars and one of these really big suckers she bought and she held it out in front of me. One of these giant things. And I looked at her like “Are you crazy lady”? Nobody’s ever done this before and of course I did it. She basically bribed me back into learning with candy and money and what was really remarkable was before very long I had such a respect for her that it sort of re-ignited my desire to learn. She got me kits for making cameras. I ground my own lens and made a camera. It was really quite wonderful. I think I probably learned more academically in that one year than I learned in my life. It created problems though because when I got out of fourth grade they tested me and they decided to put me in high school and my parents said “No.”. Thank God. They said “He can skip one grade but that’s all.”

DM: But not to high school.

SJ: And I found skipping one grade to be very troublesome in many ways. That was plenty enough. It did create some problems.

Keep reading, it’s a fascinatingly wide-ranging article.

Ok, one more excerpt, one involving Pete Stark who is still in Congress, and Bob Dole, who, fortunately, is not

One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was. When I grew up I was lucky because I was in Silicon Valley. When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer. It was down at NASA Ames (Research Center). I didn’t see the computer, I saw a terminal and it was theoretically a computer on the other end of the wire. I fell in love with it. I saw my first desktop computer at Hewlett-Packard which was called the 9100A. It was the first desktop in the world. It ran BASIC and APL I think. I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.

We saw the rate at which this was happening and the rate at which the school bureaucracies were deciding to buy a computer for the school and it was real slow. We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can’t wait. We wanted to donate a computer to every school in America. It turns out that there are about a hundred thousand schools in America, about ten thousand high schools, about ninety thousand K through 8. We couldn’t afford that as a company. But we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books, a national law that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction. That basically means you don’t make any money, you loose some but you don’t loose too much. You loose about ten percent. We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America and it would cost our company ten million dollars which was a lot of money to us at that time but it was less than a hundred million dollars if we didn’t have that. We decided that we were willing to do that.

It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said “If this law changes we will donate a hundred thousand computers at a cost of ten million dollars to us.” We called it “the kids can’t wait bill”. Pete Stark introduced it in the House and Senator Danforth introduced it in the Senate and I refused to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks, which was the most incredible thing. I met probably two-thirds of the House and over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with them.

It was very interesting. I found that the House Members are routinely less intelligent than the Senate and they were much more kneejerk to their constituencies–which I found initially quite offensive but came to understand later to be a really good idea. Maybe that’s what the framers wanted. They weren’t supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent. The Senators are supposed to think a little more. The Bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was in during Carter’s lame duck session and Bob Dole who was then Speaker of the House killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time. We would have had to have started the process over in the next year and I gave up.

However, fortunately something unique happened. California thought this was such a good idea they came to us and said “You don’t have to do a thing. We’re going to pass a bill that says ‘Since you operate in the State of California and pay California Tax, we’re going to pass this bill that says that if the federal bill doesn’t pass, then you get the tax break in California’. You can do it in California, which is ten thousand schools”. So we did. We gave away ten thousand computers in the State of California. We got a whole bunch of the software companies to give away software. We trained teachers for free and monitored this thing over the next few years. It was phenomenal. One of my great experiences and one of my biggest regrets was that really tried to do this on a national level and got so close. I don’t think Bob Dole even knew what he was doing but he really unfortunately screwed up here.

[Click to continue reading Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Steve Jobs]

Amazing.

A few interesting links collected October 5th through October 6th:

• Why I give marijuana to my autistic child. – Last spring, I wrote about applying for a medical marijuana license for my autistic, allergic 9-year-old son, J., in hopes of soothing his gut pain and anxiety, the roots of the behavioral demons that caused him to lash out at others and himself. After reading studies of how cannabis can ease pain and worry, and in consultation with his doctor, we decided to give it a try

• 

• Have You Gotten Your Google Wave Invite? – Google Wave – Lifehacker – “So far the only people I know who’ve received their invites were people who were in the dev preview, people who were invited by someone at Google, and the rest of those who were part of the very early 100,000 invite pool. Which is to say, I don’t believe that anyone who’s been invited by another Wave user has gotten their invitation yet. I quickly sent out my Wave invites to my fellow Lifehacker editors as soon as I was in, but as of now none of them have received an invitation.”On a related note, I still have a couple unclaimed invites to Google Wave. I sent out several of the eight as soon as I signed up, but nobody has gotten their invite yet that I know of

• 

• iSinglePayer iPhone App Censored by Apple « LambdaJive – iSinglePayer available in the App Store Thanks everyone for raising this issue publicly. Over the weekend Apple approved iSinglePayer and it is now available for download in the Healthcare and Fitness section of the App Store. I am glad that the app got through, and I hope that Apple will not be rejecting any more applications because they are politically charged. Thanks again, all!

Am surprised that Apple, Inc. was even part of this neo-conservative organization, but kudos for publicly leaving eventually. Exelon set a good example I guess.

Apple has become the latest company to resign from the United States Chamber of Commerce over climate policy.

“We strongly object to the chamber’s recent comments opposing the E.P.A.’s effort to limit greenhouse gases,” wrote Catherine A. Novelli, the vice president of worldwide government affairs at Apple, in a letter dated today and addressed to Thomas J. Donohue, president and chief executive of the chamber. Click here to read the letter.

“Apple supports regulating greenhouse gas emissions, and it is frustrating to find the chamber at odds with us in this effort,” Ms. Novelli continued.

Apple’s resignation was effective immediately, the letter said.

[Click to continue reading Apple Resigns From Chamber Over Climate - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com]

Now, if only the Congress would follow this example, and pass meaningful climate policy legislation!

From SourceWatch:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful business lobbying group in the United States, “used to be a trade association that advocated in a bipartisan manner for narrowly tailored policies to benefit its members. Since 1997 or so, it has become a fully functional part of the partisan Republican machine,” with CEO and president Thomas J. Donohue “raising its budget to $150M a year from corporate chiefs satisfied with his ability to move policy through a Republican Congress,” Matt Stoller wrote December 13, 2006, at MyDD.

The Chamber claims on its website that its mission is to “advance human progress through an economic, political and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, initiative, opportunity, and responsibility.”[2] It describes itself as “the world’s largest business federation representing more than 3 million businesses and organizations of every size, sector, and region.”[3]

However, the Chamber is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries,” according to James Carter, executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce.[4]

[Click to continue reading U.S. Chamber of Commerce - SourceWatch]

A few interesting links collected September 15th through September 18th:

• Author of Time ’s Beck profile digs a deeper hole | Media Matters for America – Pretty embarrassing admission for a so-called journalist: “David Von Drehle doesn’t watch Olbermann or Maddow, you see, because he already knows their opinions are “based on nothing.” The hypocrisy is jaw-dropping”

  

• t.tex’s hexes: Creative Thievery – “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.” – Jim Jarmusch
• 
• RealityStudio » Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and the Computer – On Christmas Day, 1990, Charles Bukowski received a Macintosh IIsi computer and a laser printer from his wife, Linda. The computer utilized the 6.0.7 operating system and was installed with the MacWrite II word processing program. By January 18 of the next year, the computer was up and running and so, after a brief period of fumbling and stumbling, was Bukowski. His output of poems doubled in 1991.

A few interesting links collected September 11th through September 14th:

• Sprouting 101: How do you sprout seeds, nuts and grains? – Sprouting seeds, nuts and grains is a way of greatly increasing their nutritional value and makes them easier to digest. For example, most sprouts double their protein content and have highly increased levels of vitamins! Sprouting seeds is simple and you don't need a lot of fancy equipment. Here's how:
• Mac OS X Automation: Services Downloads – These services and Automator actions are provided as examples of the design and use of Mac OS X automation technologies. All service workflows are fully editable and can be customized as need requires.
• Daily Photo Archive – Photo taken by Seth Anderson

  Featured as our daily photo on 9/11/2009.

“Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User)” (Apple)

I successfully installed Snow Leopard on all the Macs in our office¹ with no real problems to report. Well, one minor issue with an older HP LaserJet printer.

Snow Leopard has dropped support for the networking protocols collectively called AppleTalk. Since I am not a developer, I had not heard of AppleTalk being left behind. I don’t blame Apple, AppleTalk was first introduced in 1984, and it probably wasn’t a trivial task to include it in new OS releases. I wish the news had been more publicly discussed – I was a bit blind-sided by it.

However, although we have three networked printers in our office,²³ the one I use the most is the HP Laserjet 4000, probably because it is closest to me. That, and it is an awesome workhorse, having printed hundreds of thousands of pages over the 12 years or so we’ve had it, with barely a peep of trouble.

I hate disposing of working machinery; since the printer worked this morning, I wanted it to work this afternoon too. Turned out, there is a printing protocol called HP Jetdirect – Socket, and it was supposed to work with this printer. I printed the Configuration Page – input the IP address listed as the JetSend address in the appropriate spot, but the computer still could not connect successfully. Looking a little deeper, I figured out that⁴ the printer was on a different subnet mask than the rest of our network. I’ve used and supported computers for a long time, but to be honest, I don’t know that much about networking, yet I know enough that devices that you want to communicate have to be on the same subnet mask.

From there, and a bit of trial and error, I figured out how to change the assigned IP address of the HP Laserjet via a semi-hidden menu option.

Apple Forums user Strolls⁵ provided the key bit of information:

The LaserJet’s network section is hidden as the “EIO Menu”, which is covered in appendix page B-21 of the manual (page 221 in your PDF reading software). Changing “CFG Network=Yes”, then saving the option (the “select” button?), enables the sub-menu for editing the options to show up when you press the “next” button (the “item” button?). Same with “CFG TCP/IP”, but first disable Ethertalk & IPX/SPX because you’re not going to use them.

…

Try navigating the LaserJet’s menus as discussed previously to the “EIO Menu” (on mine it says “EIO 2 Jetdirect Menu”, then press “item” so that it says “CFG Network=No” and then the “value” button so it now says “CFG Network=Yes”, then “select” so a little star appears next to the “yes” (the star means the value has been saved”. Now when you press “item” again (immediately) you get to the next level of menus. Now you want “CFG TCP/IP=Yes*” and set DHCP (might also be called BOOTP – that’s the same thing) to yes. Make sure you set the little star before pressing item.

[From Apple - Support - Discussions - HP LaserJet and Snow Leopard ...]

except in my case, I set the printer’s IP address manually, with the very primitive three button interface that might have been state of the art in 1997, but now seems worse than texting on a non-smart phone.

Yayy, I can print to the LaserJet again! Snow Leopard even had the correct printer drivers, once it could connect.

Can other printers use this new print protocol? Not sure. Anyone know?

The only other items to report, at least so far:

I got a message that three fonts were duplicates: Helvetica, Geneva, and Monaco – the Snow Leopard installer asked if I wanted to delete the old fonts, or live with conflict. I opted to remove the old fonts.

I also knew I had to add Rosetta: the binary translation software that translates code compiled for PowerPC chips so that the code can run on Intel chips. Since we still limp along running Eudora on some of our machines, I knew I would need this optional install. A simple process though, and Eudora⁶ seems to run fine.

Oh and this:

no idea what this even is, or from what application, if any, but I removed the extension anyway.

The system extension “/System/Library/Extensions/CDSDAudioCaptureSupport.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. Please try reinstalling it, or contact the product’s vendor for an update.

–

Update: if you need some help figuring out all the details that I glossed over, check out Dave Greenbaum’s post How-To: Resurrect Your AppleTalk Printer in Snow Leopard

1. well, all the ones that I’m going to install it on: have three other PowerPC Macs that won’t get upgraded [↩]
2. a wonderful Xerox Phaser 8560DN and a Samsung SCX-4500 that is ok [↩]
3. update: the Samsung SCX-4500 didn’t work either, but Samsung has a 10.6 driver listed at their website [↩]
4. for some reason, I didn’t do this, I don’t think [↩]
5. aka Joe Stroller [↩]
6. and whatever else [↩]

A few interesting links collected August 27th through August 28th:

• Solipsism « Earthpages.ca – Think Free – This is the philosophical position that only the subject exists and all impressions of others and the outside world are illusory.

  While many dismiss solipsism as an extreme or strange view, others say it is logically impossible to prove or disprove

• d r i f t g l a s s: Da Mare Would Like To Apologize – "If you've never been to a public meeting where Da Mare or one of his goofs are having their political pipes rodded, let me tell you right off the bat, you should go. Over the years I’ve been to several, and it really is about as purely little-“d”-democratic an exercise as any big city could hope for: In front of Da Mare and the assembled heads of his every office and department, any citizen can step up to the microphone and “Cry Harold”"

  Awesome description: I have to go to one of these sometimes

• Review: Snow Leopard Review | Mac OS X – Page 1 | Macworld – if you later try to launch a PowerPC app, Snow Leopard will pop up a window to explain that you need Rosetta and offer to install it for you (via Apple’s Software Update utility). I can only assume that making Rosetta optional is an attempt by Apple to goad users to upgrade their apps and to shame developers who still haven’t recompiled their apps to run on Intel chips. But given that most everyday users have no idea which of their apps are Intel-native and which are PowerPC, this seems unnecessarily harsh.

Apple’s new OS, Snow Leopard, is now available for pre-order.

“Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack (5-User)” (Apple)

I always get the family pack, the cost is only slightly more, and realistically, I am going to install this on multiple machines.

“Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard” (Apple)
the single user version

“Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual” (David Pogue)

David Pogue’s Missing Manual is also available for pre-order. I don’t always buy these, but usually every second OS release, I do pick one up. Good resource to have around, usually find some good tips contained therein.