Kevin’s Blog

I’m at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) all week this week. Most of the conference is under NDA, so I can’t comment on any of the later sessions that happen.

The keynote, as usual, was excellent. The Mac Pro was definitely not a surprise to anyone, nor was the Xeon Xserve. Both of these bring Apple’s transition to Intel to completion.

Steve and other Apple execs went through 10 exciting features of Leopard, but kept some others close to the vest. They also handed out Leopard Preview DVDs to all attendees, both for the client and server OS.

For much more eloquent coverage of WWDC, check out Tom Yager’s Enterprise Mac blog.

Version 2.1 of Flip4Mac is out, with Universal binary support. Flip4Mac allows Quicktime to play WMV and other Windows Media files, both in the standalone app and inside of browsers.

Get it now: Flip4Mac 2.1.033

This definitely should have been an option from the beginning. I love my Mighty Mouse, but having a Bluetooth keyboard is a bit pointless without a mouse to go with.

I’ve tried a number of BT mice, and one glaring missing feature of most of them is a simple power switch. The only mouse I’ve found that includes one is the Macally BTmicro, but that is a tiny little mouse which is not comfortable to use for an extended period. Without an easy way to turn the mouse off, it is useless as a toss-it-in-my bag accessory. Fortunately Apple thought of this and included a power switch, just like on their Bluetooth keyboards:

Cisco has released a new version (4.6.03) which runs on all single-CPU Tiger systems. There is still an issue with dual CPU systems, but this will allow Powerbook users to upgrade to Tiger if their only issue is the lack of Cisco VPN support.

Unlike previous Cisco VPN client installs, this no longer requires a system reboot after installation.

http://www.cisco.com/kobayashi/sw-center/vpn/client/

Note that you will need a Cisco login that has access to the VPN area. Guest access won’t get you to the VPN clients, but your IT staff should have a login with access if you use a Cisco VPN.

[Update: Cisco VPN client 4.6.03 is out (5/13/05) and supports single-CPU Macs running Tiger. See here.

As many of you know, the IT group here at InfoWorld uses PowerBook G4 15’s as our primary desktop, alongside our CenterBeam-managed IBM Thinkpad T42’s for Windows-only tasks. We also have G5s for all of our Art, Copy, and Production folks.

I was planning InfoWorld’s eventual migration to Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger over the weekend, and was doing some research on some of our critical apps that we use here at InfoWorld. I’ve been testing Tiger on a spare Powerbook and discovered that the Cisco VPN client (version 4.6.02.0023) wouldn’t run at all. After installing and rebooting, it came up with the following when I launched the VPN client:

A little research revealed that Apple has changed the API for Network Kernel Extensions (NKEs) in Tiger, which the Cisco (and other) VPN clients use.

No word yet on an updated version from Cisco that suppports Tiger, but hopefully we’ll see something soon. For now, this is a real showstopper for many enterprise Mac users. No matter how much the new Tiger features make us drool, we can’t lose our ability to remotely manage our infrastructure.

More details:

Cisco Forums

Macrumors.com

Amazon has a preorder special on OS X Tiger for $94.99 after a $35 Amazon.com rebate special offer.

A new beta of Skype for OS X was released today. Version 0.12.0.8 finally supports audio preferences, so you can have Skype use your headset or handset, while all the rest of your audio uses the normal Audio Preferences setting. This was one of the big issues in previous versions, and will make using Skype a much nicer experience on the Mac.

If you have Skype and want to give me a ring, my contact name is KevinRailsback. Get the new release here.

Excellent HowTo from Phil Torrone @ Engadget

How-To: Podcasting (aka How to get Podcasts and also make your own): “

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This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our
first Engadget “Podcast” MP3. The first
part is how to get “Podcasts” on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3,
most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your
iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.

Doc Searls may have said it best: “PODcasting will shift much
of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what
we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as
well.”

For the second part of the how-to you can listen to a Podcast we made featuring
Lenn Pryor and Phillip
Torrone. It’s about 40 minutes long, and we’re thinking about doing one each week (let us know what you think, this
was just a test).

The third part of the how-to is about making your own Podcast. Think of this as DIY Radio. We looked around for
resources, and while there were many ways to do this, most required buying some sort of sound software application, so
for our how-to we’re using a Mac, GarageBand (came free with our Mac), and two free sound tools.

Getting Podcasts on your iPod

Here are the Mac and PC ways to download the Podcast MP3s, with listings for some different feeds (audio shows)
following.

Mac

On the Mac side of things, there’s iPodderX, which is basically a newsreader that
reads RSS 2.0 feeds with enclosures. It takes those enclosures and automatically downloads them in the background. If
the file is an audio file, it then moves it to iTunes for download to your iPod, so with iPodderX you constantly have
fresh content to listen to. iPodderX downloads any type of file, (even Torrents) so you can wake up in the morning with
a fresh set of audio shows, video programs, or whatever else you’ve subscribed to.

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PC

iPodder.NET

is a media aggregator that automatically downloads content to your machine. All you have to do is subscribe to RSS
feeds, and your machine handles the rest for you. It integrates automatically with iTunes, creating playlists and
synching with your attached iPod.

The Feeds

Once you’ve installed the Podcast retriever, add some feeds to which ever application you’re going to use.

Now, if you don’t want to use a tool to automatically download the MP3 podcast you can
right click / option click this link and
grab the MP3 directly. The good part about this method is that you don’t need an iPod, just anything that plays
MP3s.

Here are some feeds that are currently floating around.

Engadget PodCast feed (our beta)

http://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/rss.xml

Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/rss.xml

Dave Slusher’s Evil Genius Chronicles

http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/audio/bittorrent.rss (Torrent Feed)

http://www.evilgeniuschronicles.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/index.rss20 (MP3 Feed)

Dave Winer’s The Scripting News

http://www.scripting.com/rss.xml

Legal Torrents

http://www.legaltorrents.com/musicrss.xml

Others

Keep an eye out here for new feeds, on
podcaster.net, podcasts.org as well as
googling for “podcasts” and also
check out the Podcaster’s Yahoo Groups list. We’re also going
to ping some friends who do web shows as well and see if we can help get their files up in Podcastable format. We’d
love to see Off the Hook and Off the Wall, just to name a few.

Making your own Podcast

We suspect there are going to be a zillion ways to make your own Podcast, after we show you how we set up ours, we’ve
also including some links for other methonds that people have posted up. Once we figure out how to do the same with our
PC, we’ll have another how to on that as well. The main reason you need to do anything other than hit record in a sound
app for a Podcast is you’re likely to want to have other people talking, with a proper Podcast you can use iChat and
record both parties talking as well as mixing in music. In our first attempt we were able to invite a friend and talk,
play music as well as feed other sounds, all recording to one final track in GarageBand.

Ingredients for our Podcast recording set up

Mac (15-inch G4 Powerbook)

Headphones

Microphone (we used the built-in mic)

Garage Band

SoundFlower + SoundBed (free)

Line-In (free)

We’re going to assume you have your Mac set up, Garageband is installed, headphones, mic and you have iChat running.
We’re also going to list the applications that need to be downloaded, then how to configure them all.

Soundflower

The first apps to download are Soundflower and Soundbed. Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows
applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio
application to send and receive audio with no other support needed.

Once you install the Soundflower application, you’ll need to restart. Then it’s time to run SoundBed.

SoundBed

When using Soundflower to send audio to and from applications, you may find that you are not able to send audio
through another device to monitor audio output. In those situations you can use Soundflowerbed, an application that
resides in the Finder’s Menubar allowing you to tap into Soundflower channels and route them to an audio device.

While this is not required, it makes it easy to test audio devices and turn it all on and off.

Line-In

Line-In is a simple application for OS X to enable the soft playthru of audio from input devices. In simpler terms,
you can use LineIn to play sound coming in through a microphone or any other device plugged in to your Sound In
port.

Configuring the applications

Once you downloaded and installed the applications, now it’s time to route all the audio to their final destination:
GarageBand.

Using Soundflower

Open the Sound Preferences (Apple Menu > System Preferences > Sound).

Click Sound Effects and select “Built-in Audio: Headphones”. This will play any sound effects through the headphones
and not into the recording.

Click Output and click Soundflower (2ch). Before you do this you may want to adjust the volume, which is what you’re
hearing in the headphones.

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Click Input, again, adjusting the Input level if needed, and then Select Soundflower (2ch).

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Later, if you want to turn Soundflower on or off on the fly, you can use Soundbed by opening it now, it appears in
the FInder’s menubar as a flower.

Line-In

Next up, Line-In. Open the application and click “Enabled” “Built-in Audio” in the Input Device area and for Source
choose “Internal Microphone”.

For Output in the Line-In under device choose “Soundflower (2ch) and for source default.

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This will take the microphone sound and add it to the Soundflower audio, which is where we’re pushing all the audio
to and then recording it.

iChat settings

Open up iChat and go to iChat > Preferences > Video.

For Microphone choose “Soundflower (2ch) and for Sound Output choose “Soundflower 2ch” again.

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This takes the iChat sound (the person you’re going to chat with) and adds that to Soundflower for recording.

GarageBand

Open up Garageband, it will likely ask you to start a new song, so click “Create New Song”.

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You can name yours whatever you want, and Save As any location you wish on your system. We chose test and put it on
our Desktop. When starting a project, you also have other options such as Tempo, Time, Key, bpm, but we’re leaving
those all as default, since we’re not going to be recording a song.

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Click Create.

When GarageBand starts up, it will automatically have a Grand Piano track, click that track and then delete it (Track
> Delete > Track).

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Add a new track, Track > New Track. Click “Real Instrument” Vocals and “No Effects”. Also Choose “Stereo” in the
Format selection. Click OK.

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In preferences (GarageBand > Preferences > Audio/MIDI choose “Built-in Audio” for Audio Output and for
“Soundflower (2ch) for Audio Input.

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This will take all our sounds and record them directly in to GarageBand.

You are now ready to record. Believe it or not, this is the easy way to do this for now, though we suspect
there will be a simple application that will do all of this (just like blogging started out complicated, then all these
great tools hit the market). Once you hit record, you’re on your way. To add sound, we opened up MP3 files in Quicktime
and played them in the beginning and end of the show. We also tested to see if playing sounds from website (Macromedia
Flash) would get recorded too, and it does, so that means there’s a lot of potential to choose what types of sounds,
music, and effects you want to add to a broadcast.

You can either have your friend on iChat before or after you start recording. We had our pal on the entire time just
to do some testing, and that’s what we’re going to suggest here. Do some tests and bang away until all the settings are
working and the results are what you’re happy with.

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Once you’ve finished recording, click the record button again to stop recording. You can also click the rewind
button here to listen to your handywork and make any edits if you wanted to.

Exporting to iTunes

Click File > Export to iTunes to export to iTunes, this is where we’re going to convert it to a MP3. iTunes will
then open up and you can listen to it there as well, but we’re not done yet.

Exporting to MP3

iTunes can convert the huge file we just sent over to it and convert it to a MP3 all with the built in encoder. For
this test we used the following settings:

iTunes > Preferences > Importing, Click Setting “Custom” and choose 32kbps for the Stereo bit rate, Quality
Medium, Sample Rate 16.000 kHz, channels stereo and Stereo Mode: Joint Stereo. We may ultimately change these, but for
now it sounds good the file it will create is under 10mb. Click OK and then click the song and Click Advanced >
Convert Selection to MP3.

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Once the file is converted, you can drag it out of iTunes to the desktop or find it via Music > iTunes >
iTunes Music in your music folder.

From here you can send the file, post the file, put it on your iPod, whatever, but if you want people to download it
automatically, here’s how.

Making the Podcast feed (RSS feed with enclosures)

RSS 2.0 allows you to have an enclosure (much like you’d send an email with an attachment), so after the feed is
pulled down the file is there with no waiting (besides the download time, of course). The key premise is No More
Click-Wait. Ideally, when your computer isn’t doing anything, it can be using RSS feeds to automatically download audio
and video content. Anyone can do this, and there is no central authority, no spectrum to allocate, and it’s open to
amateurs, just like the Internet itself. More on that here and
here.

For our tests, and for now, here’s our Podcast RSS 2.0
feed that you can use.

Here’s what it looks like…at least the mp3 part that is…

<enclosure url=”http://http://www.engadget.com/common/videos/pt/Engadget_Podcast01.mp3” length=”1023800”
type=”audio/mpeg”/>

Enclosure is where the file lives, length is how big it is, and the type is what it is.

So, there it is…as this gets easier, we’ll likely update with a new how-to, and if you’re looking for another way to
do this, Hugo Schotman has an excellent
overview of how he rolled his together.

---

Phillip Torrone can be reached via his personal site
http://www.flashenabled.com

“

(Via Engadget.)

Tigger (http://www.furrysoft.de/?page=tigger) is a shareware app that scrolls info in your unused menu bar space. I use it to scroll iTunes info so its there at a glance, but it’s expandable with other plugins to show other info. Cool stuff.

I also still use Synergy (http://synergy.wincent.com/), an awesome iTunes controller app that also runs in the menubar. Synergy will pop up a semi-transparent window showing the song info and cover art each time the track changes in iTunes in addition to the play/pause, next, last track buttons it puts on the menu bar.

The battery of the PowerBook and iBook have a built-in processor that manages the remaining power and updates the battery life remaining that you see in your menu bar.

Check out this AppleCare knowledgebase entry for details on calibrating your PowerBook or iBook’s battery. This needs to be done when the machine is new, and every few months thereafter.

I did the calibration on my 15″ PowerBook G4 today, and after the battery drained down to 10 minutes remaining, I got that “You are now on reserve power” warning. Normally I go plug in when I see that… but this time I just kept working and watched the battery meter get down to 1 minute remaining. It stayed at the 1 minute mark for 30 minutes before it finally went to sleep. So, basically the battery’s calibration was off by 30 minutes or so. Once the battery is fully charged, my total time remaining will be 30 minutes longer than it was before I calibrated.

Now to do this with my second battery….