Hal O'Brien

From Kottke (omitting the snark):

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If you've got a Mac, the "droid" sound that Android phones make -- yep, the one from the commercials -- can be produced in the following manner:

1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type say -v "Cellos" "droid" at the prompt

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I can attest this works on my MacMini. And it doesn't even generate a mac snow crash.

Speaking of which... A cow-orker turned me on to the electric sheep screensaver, which is fairly cool. The way it ties into the mac's monthly-or-so snow crashes is, running it seems to defeat the power saving. So it might inhibit whatever it is the mac is screwing up on the sleep/wake cycles that induces snow crashes.

(NB: the electric sheep screensaver should not be confused with Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep Comix, or with Farley's awesome story, The Spiders. Because, cool as the screen saver may be, it doesn't hold a candle to Farley.)

EDITED TO ADD: Regarding the snow crash, that would be no. I just came to the machine to find a) it had blanked the screen in power-save, and b) a snow crash upon wake.

So when minimax was doing the bizarre newfangled progressive scan mac snow crash last week, I noticed the video cord and its adapter were hanging loosely on the back of the machine. Mind you, plugging it in solidly didn't appear to have any effect, but still.

So today I received and have plugged in a new DisplayPort-to-DVI cable. It's half the length, needs no adapter, and is generally less clutter.

We'll see if it forestalls any more snow crashes. Since it was a $10 part, wouldn't that be amusing.

Minimax just did a snow crash again.

Not the standard one, though. This time it happened while running Front Row as I was doing the dishes. The screen had gone completely blank, as if the system was trying to run the screensaver. OTOH, I thought the whole point of the album cover flips in Front Row was to inhibit the screensaver -- perhaps I'm wrong.

So, with the screen dark, I pressed Shift to get out of the saver... And then saw snow. As I was sitting there thinking, "Oh, no. Not this again. Now what?" the audio continued to play. Then suddenly, the snow cleared, and I had Front Row's normal screen again. It's the first time I've seen a snow crash clear of its own accord.

AKICOLJ: I ask again, "Now what?" Go ahead and take it back to Apple? Grit my teeth and bear it?

EDITED TO ADD: I just went into Energy Saver in System Preferences, and set both Computer Sleep and Display Sleep to "Never." I also unchecked the "hard disk(s) to sleep when possible" option. ADDING TO THE ADDITION: OK, I've dialed it back a bit from there, but by as little as I can -- 3 hours before sleep.

There I was, yesterday, about 30 minutes away from picking akirlu up from the train and then going on to my Chinese class. We were supposed to do a skit in class, and I'd cleverly organized the other two students so we'd worked on it via email. Now it was time to print it out, so I'd have a reading copy for class.

So I went into GMail, prepared to print, and...

...found my Samsung ML-1210 printer had disappeared, as far as my Mac was concerned.

Power cycle the thing, no joy. Start Googling... and found out the ML-1210 was one of the printers whose support had been dropped by Apple in the Snow Leopard upgrade even if you'd had a perfectly valid driver installed for Leopard.

I went to class without a printout, having run out of time. Fortunately, one of my classmates is also a bright fellow, and printed out extra copies.

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In case someone runs into the same problem, and needs a workaround for this specific printer:

The Linux Foundation (of all places) has drivers that appear to work with the Samsung ML-1210 printer and Snow Leopard.

NB: You need the three files shown there, Samsung-GDI, Foomatic-RIP, and Ghostscript. However, they should be installed in the reverse order they're shown on the page, thus:

* First, Ghostscript 8.64

* Followed by Foomatic-RIP 4.0.2

* And finally, Samsung-GDI 1.816.2

Why they're not listed on the page in the order they need to be installed is one of life's enduring mysteries. It probably has to do with the Linux Philosophy: If it was easy, anyone could do it, and as few people as possible should be using Linux/*NIX, n'est-ce pas?

I have a lot of music files. No, I mean, a lot -- 35330, sez iTunes.

I've been carrying them around on USB hard drives for a while now. I figured, "Hey, I know... I have this new shiny Mac that Just Works, and I'll consolidate them on my desktop hard drive!"

Big mistake.

See, since iTunes 7, Apple added a "feature" called "gapless playback." This was designed to smoothly segue from one track to another on those albums where the tracks all do just blend together.

The problem? To do that, iTunes has to "determine gapless playback information"... for every single track. It's at the track level, not at the global level, and it can't be set as a preference by the user. It does this in increments of 453 songs at start-up. iTunes is slow as frozen molasses until it finishes.

Google gives 1400 hits on this problem. The number one hit goes back to 2006. It suggests a solution (select all your tracks, set "gapless album" to "no"). It also notes this solution doesn't work for everyone. {cough}

It may occur to the more mathematically minded that 35330 divided by 453 is about 78. I can look forward to this problem the next 78 times I start iTunes. I can't even just let iTunes run for a few days while it finishes this pointless job, because it only grabs things 453 tracks at a time, and, yet again, that isn't user-configurable.

Ah, Apple... So many hard-to-discover "features."

I should count my blessings. At least this isn't causing a Mac snow crash.

As promised:

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Well, a month-plus in to using Minimax (my Mac Mini), I can report I've seen it do something I thought was only an exaggeration:

A snow crash.

I wish I was kidding. I sat down at my desk to see my monitor flickering away. It wasn't the classic black-and-white TV snow -- it was more finely grained, and colorful.

It was snow, though. And completely unresponsive to anything other than a power cycle.

I haven't made much of the hiccups I've come across, because I know I have enough Mac devotees that it would only annoy them. Still, there's something that's become a catch phrase in these parts:

"'Just Works,' My Ass."

Little did I know I'd learn Neal Stephenson wasn't making a compelling picture to throw upon the imagination of the reader.