Be wary of FreeCreditReport.com. If you don’t read the print on the left, you’ll miss that if you don’t call within 7 days, your “free” credit report turns into a monthly subscription.

So in other words, you get what you pay for, and the credit agencies are the ones tricking you.

Great country we live in, eh?

Here is their text, which is plain and clear, but you gotta read it as the page is designed to keep your eyes away from the text:

When you order your free report here, you will begin your free trial membership in Triple AdvantageSM Credit Monitoring. If you don’t cancel your membership within the 7-day trial period*, you will be billed $14.95 for each month that you continue your membership.

ConsumerInfo.com and Freecreditreport.com are not affiliated with the annual free credit report program. Under a new Federal law, you have the right to receive a free copy of your credit report once every 12 months from each of the three nationwide consumer reporting companies. To request your free annual report under that law, you must go to www.annualcreditreport.com.

While trying to fill out a voter registration form, I ran into this sad state of affairs:

1. Preview works with the check boxes and radio buttons, but the text fields are only 2 characters wide.
2. SmileOnMyMac’s PDFpen application doesn’t work at all. Radio buttons are displayed randomly on the page, the text fields are not editable at all.

3. Adobe’s own reader works for editing, but they don’t let you save the document! To make matters even more insulting, they have gone out of their way to disable OS X’s “Save as PDF” from the Print Dialog! So you get this comical, yet infuriating sequence:

   3a. “You cannot save this form, instead print it for your records”

   3b. “Save as PDF has been disabled. Use File->Save instead”

ROFL. Stupid Adobe. Another company going down in flames, just like Microsoft, slowly but surely. Maybe this is some maneuver to push people to buy their distiller product or some other software?

Edit:

Found this hack on the Apple forums:

Adobe Reader and Preview can’t save filled-in PDFs, only print them. You can install CUPS-PDF http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx to create a virtual printer. When you print to that printer, it will create a PDF file of the filled-in form

Cool, another reason to rent Apple TV movies.

Read about Netflix decision

I picked up Digital Video Esstentials from Amazon to calibrate my DLP TV set.

The information was good, if not too much. The instructions on how to use the video patterns was poor - They fire too much information at the user without specific steps.

However, once I watched the same segment several times, I figured out what sort of what I needed to do and adjusted the color on my set.

Brightness was close, but still too high. My set (or the PS3, or the video switch) is dropping blacker-than-black information, so I went with adjusting the left pluge bar.

The colors were really off, and using the color/tint settings were doing nothing useful, so I set those back to default (center values) and used the PerfectColor and PerfectTint controls of my Mitsubishi 57732. This worked much much better.

I didn’t really know how the color values would interact, so I guessed and by trial and error, got things fairly spot on. The only error in color is in the green filter, where magenta and cyan would appear as dark gray, not black. No matter what I did, I could not get them to appear black.

The red and blue filters were spot on, and the green colors (yellow, green) were spot on also.

We’ve noticed much more vibrant colors in both SD and HD content. While watching Jay Leno on the TiVo, Jay looks more red (he appeared grayish before) and the products he was making fun of, blue and green packaging just popped in color. Yellow looks fantastic now, vs washed out before.

I found through the other patterns that my sharpness could be 7 vs 0. My set has a 2.5% overscan and passed all of the resolution tests.

I did not use the set for any audio adjustments as this place only permits us to use 3.1, so I didn’t find it worth it to muck with that.

For $20, this is a very good tool in calibrating your HDTV, just be prepared to be confused by their overly technical explanations and lack of clear directions.

I’ve now found 5 spreadsheets for Excel, written in Excel, that won’t open in the 2008 Office for Mac.

• No VBA Macros
• Super slow performance (try 15 minutes to edit a cell)

Are the two big issues. What a joke.

Edit:

• I have tried the latest 12.0.1 version.
• http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t11882-roguegearspreadsheet/ is one of the spreadsheets that fails, if you choose a new race for example

Sometimes, a beautiful statement can be made from the dreadful loss of life:

Mosaic of Cheney and Bush made from the photos of 4,000 dead soldiers

Yes! Yes!

After 12 months of not being able to use my router, Apple shipped Firmware 7.3.1 which passes SonicWall VPN packets!

So far, the router is fast, super fast. Now to see if it keeps connections!

I gave a demo of NetNewsWire at PMUG tonight. Well actually, I am giving the demo

I have not tried this yet but looks interesting:

Backup Bouncer

Note: This is a geek tool at the moment - Requires XCode, etc.

We’re getting close to shipping Sophie. Here is a page with some tutorials we set up for Ross High School. They show what I’ve been working on for some time now:

Sophie

• Make movie in iMovie
• Upload to .mac web gallery
• Get url: http://gallery.mac.com/sriggins#100087

What the hell is that? Why didn’t it let me choose the url to use? iWeb does the same lame stuff.

I can’t take this serious with a url like sriggins#100087

I forgot the foil wrapped cucumber.

I ordered a Mac Pro, Dual Quad Core 2.8 with 2gb RAM and the nVidia 8800GT today from the Apple Store.

Just kiddin, Erick. I ordered it via The Beaverton Mac Store, got my PMUG discount (5% for you PMUG members!), and also picked up AppleCare for my MacBook Pro.

I’ll add more RAM and drives later. I see crucial just started shipping Mac Pro 2008 RAM.

This machine will be a server, play WoW really well and let me free up my overworked laptop some.

All of my music and videos will go to the Pro. I’ll take boot camp off the laptop and move Windows to a VMWare image on my external 100gb drive when I need that. That alone will free up 48gb of space.

I’ll put boot camp on the pro on a second drive, so it can be fully dedicated if I ever need that, but since the Pro will be our Apple TV synced machine, that will limit how much time I can spend in Windows

Not sure when it’ll arrive. Should be super duper fast though

1. I see file I want on dock, drag to Finder window.
2. Poof sound and animation heard. Crap, I just deleted my Downloads stack off the dock
3. See downloads in said Finder window. Drag to dock.
4. Poof sound and animation heard. Crap, I just deleted my Downloads sidebar item, also.

/sigh

If you write software, you should be using Fogbugz

Not only is the software/service great, when I told them I was going to buy a copy for my personal use, they said “Just switch to the free 2 user account” Whoa.

This site, developed by the infamous “Joel on Software,” allows you to track cases (bugs, features) on a project, track time spent on those cases and predicts how long it will take to meet your goals.

This is not just for software development though. Track all of your tasks in here, use the site to track how long it really took to install that Word on a client’s machine, etc, so in 4 months you can set up a project like “Client Fred” and enter the 5 cases Fred needs completed, then let fogbugz give you a schedule spread as to how likely you’re to finish on time.

It’s really need, but you do need to read the documentation so you understand all that the software has to offer, which like Transformers, has more than meets the eye.

It’s on your software update. And here I thought it was my lame typing or iSkin that was causing the first character I typed to be lost!

From Tim:

Don’t know whether you’ve ever tried:

        defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.50

to set the global scaling (works pretty well except some apps actually go all fuzzy and others look fabulous)? It turns out it breaks the cmd-shift-4 to snapshot the screen and save the image to a file. The general advice if you google this stuff is to do:

        defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.00

to revert to normal size - which indeed it does but snapshotting is still broken. What you need to do to both revert and repair snapshotting is:

        defaults delete NSGlobalDomain AppleDisplayScaleFactor

Let me tell you a somewhat long tale about the week I’ve had. This will get a little geeky, but you’d find out exactly why you should be using Time Machine and maybe a few tips to help your disaster recovery process.

Time Machine is Mac OS X 10.5’s automatic backup system. You attach a drive to the computer and after a simple dialog, you’re backed up.

Time Machine backs up every hour, quite quickly, and then keeps the last day’s changes and one set of changes every week.

If your computer has a 140gb hard drive and you have a 300gb Time Machine, you can easily keep 3-4 months worth of data in your Time Machine. This allows you to go “back in time” and get a file you just ruined, etc.

I have three Time Machines:

1. One I keep offsite, that I plug in once a week or so to update. This is in case the house burns down
2. One I keep downstairs in the office
3. One I keep next to the couch

To switch Time Machines, you simply attach the drive, open the Time Machine preferences and select the different Time Machine.

Last Tuesday I had been on the couch using Time Machine as normal, then we went to lunch. As I usually do, I unplugged the Time Machine to take it with me, so that way, again if the house burns down, the laptop is lost, but not my data. Call it paranoid, but I did have a tree fall on my house once

We come back from lunch and get back to work. Later that night, around 7pm I am checking out World of Warcraft and noticing i have very slow graphics, like 8-9 frames per second.

Being a developer, I download the 10.5.2 graphics update 1.0 and reapply this to my Mac, thinking it couldn’t hurt.

Well, on reboot, my video was dead. Black screen of death. Over the next couple hours I tried everything, reset the SMC, the PRAM, try an external monitor, boot off DVD, boot off the repair disk, safe boot, you name it, I tried it.

Well this sucks. We are shipping Sophie this week and my machine is dead.

I have a second laptop, which Elizabeth uses, so I decide to use that. Now both of these machines have user accounts for me and both have the same ’short’ name. This proved to be very important.

I log into my user on the backup machine and attach my Time Machine. Then I use Browse Other Time Machines by holding down option when I choose the Time Machine menu in 10.5.2. I select my Time Machine drive and wham, there are my files!

So I go back in time, and the last backup is from 1:57pm, when we went to lunch. Crap! I had not plugged the time machine in again.

Since I knew the laptop was working, I removed the Time Machine from the backup machine, booted the now-video-less laptop, attached the Time Machine and waited. Then I logged in by typing blindly.

I then waited and waited until I saw the disk being used and yes, Time Machine was backing up. This took an hour, but you can start it by ssh if you are a geek - Another article on that topic later.

So after the Time Machine disk stopped accessing, I pressed power, then return to safely shut down. I plugged the Time Machine back into the backup laptop and wham, the most recent backup was now the current time.

I restored my email and work data and went back to work.

I took the laptop into the Apple store at 8:30pm and they said they didn’t have the motherboard. I called the next morning and Bridgeport Village had one. By 12pm Wednesday Apple had my machine and I headed home to get back to work.

This morning, Thursday at 8:30am I get a call. My laptop is repaired! Sweeet! So I go pick it up at 10am and notice they forgot to reset the serial number. This was a sure sign I did indeed get a whole new motherboard. They reset the motherboard and I come home. Talk about great service!

I use the time machine on the backup laptop (A different time machine disk) to restore the data I had worked on from the previous day and a half, remove the second time machine and plug in my downstairs time machine.

I didn’t want to touch my most recent time machine, and did this prove to be wise.

You see, my machine name is ’serenity’ and while I had a new motherboard, I had the same hard drive. So, I should just plug in the Time Machine, select Backup Now and be good to go, right?

Nope. “Not enough space to back up, please choose another Time Machine”

What? Alright fine. I look on the Time Machine disk and there are now two folders, ’serenity’ and ’serenity 2′ Oh noes, Time Machine thinks this is a new computer

Sure enough, with help from friends I found this article on Mac OS X Hints that describes how Time Machine records the Ethernet MAC address of your computer with the folder associated with your machine.

This data is kept at a very geeky layer, hidden in the Access Control Lists, so repairing this was not for the faint of heart. That is another article topic for later as well.

After a lot of mucking around, and an all important reboot, I had my time machine understanding that this new machine is really the computer for this time machine.

I’ll have to repeat these steps with my other two time machines. Joy.

So, after all of this, what did I learn that I can pass on to you?

1. Keep your Time Machine plugged in 100% of the time, so you always have your latest data
2. Do not use an internal disk for a Time Machine. Convenient? Yes. Easily usable on an emergency computer? No.
3. Keep file sharing turned on just in case your computer’s video dies.
4. Spend the money and buy multiple drives for Time Machines.
5. Be aware that if a computer repair replaces your motherboard, you likely won’t be able to use your old time machines for backing up. You can get the data off, but likely not put more data on, depending on the size of the drive.

I can see why Apple doesn’t just use a machine name to map computers to Time Machines. There are many scenarios where someone could wipe out a Time Machine by either naming their machines the same, or getting a new computer and wiping the time machine out by backing up an empty drive, etc.

However, Apple does need to handle this use case where nothing but the motherboard changed.

Regardless, use Time Machine. Use many Time Machines. Keep them running 24/7.

It will save your butt when Murphy’s Law strikes.

I bought an Apple TV after Apple’s promised rental changes. Ok, so it is a toy, really I mean come on, $230 just to pay Apple more money to rent movies, but i love tech and wanted to check this out.

I’ve always wanted a 1080p Apple TV and while this is still 720p, my TV does a great upconverting job.

I rented “SuperBad” in SD via iTunes earlier in the month. Once the update installed, I tried to find the movie via streaming, but it could not be found.

I then realized you have to sync to watch movies rented on your computer. So I set up a custom sync and moved the movie over to the Apple TV.

This process, about 1.6gb of data, took 30 minutes. You can’t play a rented movie that is syncing, you have to wait.

The audio was prologic, and the colors a bit dull and dark, but the quality was very acceptable.

After that movie, I decided to rent The Simpsons movie in HD. After about 14 seconds, my movie was ready to go.

WOW, the colors are fantastic. The audio is 5.1 and sounds great.

This could get expensive. Even though we have Netflix for Blu Ray, renting HD movies via the Apple TV is fast and fairly affordable.

Oh yes, we’re watching Simpsons while iTunes is doing a new “automatic” sync, which will keep as much data on the Apple TV and let me stream everything else, in theory at least

I have been hearing about netipots for two months or so, and as someone who has always had allergies, taken medication, worn masks in the yard and soon to have a new kitty, I am interested in any solution to allergy relief.

So a netipot is just a pot - some look like aladdin’s lamp, others more like pots, with the spout the right size to fit in your nostril.

You basically wash your nasal passages with a salt based solution, using gravity only.

The trick is finding a good solution with the proper temperature of water.

My first attempt, using a NeilMed netipot and their solution, was near perfect, except the water was not quite warm enough. Too cold and it feels a little like drowning. Warmer water cures that.

The results? Even with this cold, I am fully clear and breathing easier than even without a cold.

I think I will do this before I go to bed, and in the am, just to see how it keeps me clean. The concept is to repair the nasal hairs with moisture, while washing out the gunk, dust, bacteria, mucous that might be in your nose.

You are not sniffing at all, as that might draw solution into your ears. Rather, you tilt your head forward and to the side, run the solution from the high nostril and out the lower one it comes. Repeat with 50% solution on the other side.

Here is some guy’s video of the process: