BLOGSERVATIONS

Buck Rogers would have been pissed. Well, we’re only in the 21st Century — Buck wakes up in the 25th, so he wouldn’t be pissed yet — but when we get there we may just be the dumbest civilization in history. Even though our road was paved by genius.

Brilliant progressive thinkers of the 20th Century have brought us amazing technological advances. The late Steve Jobs will come to mind as one of the most recent and influential, having significantly changed the face of personal computing with Apple Macs, iPads and iPhones, branding our civilization with the tempting fruit of Eden. Some Christians will enjoy putting devil horns on him for that… as if.

With over 116 million iPhones and more than 56 million iPads sold by Q3 of 2013, Apple has truly empowered humankind with amazing technology. Powerful tools for communication, productivity, art and expression. And what do we do with it? We Facebook.

It can be used as a verb now you know, not as often as, but similar to “text, tweet, pm,” and the older tech-comm verb “email.” Each has a past participle form as well, “texted, tweeted, pm’ed, and emailed.” Think back too, the original tech-com verbs were words like “penned,” “phoned” and “radioed,” when we first began to use those technologies.

To get back to it… I guess it falls into the “expression” category. Facebook is an amazing technology in that it made one man stupidly filthy rich (Mark Zuckerberg is worth about 18 billion as of September 2013), like many marketable technology fads, and it functions great as a networking tool, but it also enables us to waste huge amounts of time.

Wasted Time, Money and other Woes of Social Media
We’ve become Facebook Zombies! Active users spend an average of about 8 hours monthly on Facebook. I’m one of them, so this isn’t some fringe commentary against the masses. That said I will state that I try to limit my time, only post when I have something worthwhile or incredibly funny to say, and don’t play any of the games. Sorry, but I’ve got better ways to waste my time than virtual “farming” or playing pretend on a computer.

Why is it so easy for us to get caught up in pretend worlds when there is a truly remarkable real world right outside the door?

In the past — as in, the “olden days” — to kill some time around the house we’d play cards, Scrabble, or watch TV. Many of us spent a hell of a lot of time outside riding our bikes and climbing trees too, but yes, we wasted time watching TV. What I think makes it a little worse today is that we’re doing more of both. We’re watching as much or more TV, and Facebooking, texting, tweeting, whatever-else-ing on the internet.

It gets worse when you consider how much money businesses are throwing away because a larger percentage of their employees are incredibly sidetracked by social media and text messaging. One estimate is that companies surveyed were losing $10 million each year through decreased productivity. Consider this article on the subject.

Should those companies sue Zuckerberg for lost revenue? Of course not, but the impact is real and significant.

Is the technology also “dumming us down?” Will we have generations with fewer bright thinkers or leaders than today? Can our civilization survive? Consider not just the waste of time that Facebook and other social networks contribute to, but the massive spreading of misinformation which in some cases threatens to undermine the science that has helped eradicate disease over the last several decades.

Case in point: Jenny McCarthy and the anti-vaccine movement. Stupid on a level beyond comprehension, but it has grown and proliferated with the help of social media. Why? Because people spread hype and hysteria without first find the facts for themselves. These social networking sites help facilitate the spread of this damaging nonsense. The damage is ongoing.

Night of the Living Dead or People of Walmart?
If you have to herd the human race like a bunch of dumb bovines through a field in order to get them to be more productive something is wrong. It brings to mind the wandering hoard of Walmart Zombies encountered by focused shoppers armed with a concise list who wish to keep their shopping trip brief so they can get back to life outside.

It can be a mind-numbing sideshow. A number of people actually spend hours of their day just walking around the store like the living dead, and some of them dress that way too! George Romero could have saved thousands of dollars on zombie extras if Walmart existed in 1968.

We need to self check
Here’s a test: Look in the mirror (in your bathroom or you can find one in the health and beauty aisle of the store, if that’s where you are)… if you look gaunt and pale, mouth hanging agape, eyes droopy, and you spend either too much time in front of your computer on Facebook, or too much time in Walmart, time to get the hell outside and get some fresh air!

Read a book, play a guitar, take a walk or kiss your spouse. Get the hell up and get with life.

I was going to start calling my Mac OS Slow Leopard.

If you’re noticing painfully slow list population in your Finder windows, whether you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, I think I found the fix. There may be some special cases where memory usage and third party apps and background services are causing the slow down, but this worked for me, and a bunch of other people according to a thread at MacRumors.com.

My fiancé has a MacBook, which up until today was running Leopard, and for several months had been running super slow. Sluggish browser behavior, very slow population of lists in Finder windows, that sort of thing. Most of the time I attributed to the fact that she had a bunch of browser windows open at the same time, which can hog memory.

I just upgraded the OS to Snow Leopard in the hopes that it would solve the problem. No such luck. The poor Mac was running as slow as a turtle on flypaper. I checked the activity monitor and found Boingo, banished that since she doesn’t use it anymore. Saw a Rosetta Stone Launch Daemon running, and she had removed that software months ago. Stopped that, but still no improvement.

A quick search of the web revealed the answer, and I could not believe it. A MacRumors thread contains this gem, “Jack the double mouse click speed to the highest setting. The higher the double click the faster the folders in the finder open. Sounds crazy, but it work for me. When set to a low setting the folders in the finder take about 3-5 seocnds to open. I sent bug reports to Apple.”

It does work! The MacBook has a trackpad but the same solution holds true: Go into System Preferences, Trackpad, and increase the Double-Click Speed to the highest setting. Now go to back to your finder, open a folder and watch the file lists load in instantly. Nice huh?

Contrary to what the posts said at Macrumors.com, the fix persisted even when I went back and reduced the Double-Click Speed to the previous setting, so it seems that even a transient change in Double-Click Speed resets something somewhere that affects the finder speed and even browser speeds. Going back into Safari showed it loading pages lickety split too.

Problem solved, but I still can’t understand why. Apparently there has been no official word from Apple regarding the what’s and why’s of this issue, but at least it’s a fix.

Hope it helps you out!

If you really want to know how to do something, don’t bother going to eHow!

Almost everytime I search Google for information on how to accomplish a specific task — whether it’s replacing the power window regulator in a Honda Civic, writing a php script to play mp3 files, or something like that — eHow shows up at the top of the search results. Google needs to seriously reevaluate sites like eHow if they want to provide the world with useful information, because eHow is a content farm with a bunch of nonsense.

I’ve had so many useless run-ins with eHow that I avoid clicking their links when they come up in a search. When I was searching how to replace a Power Window Regulator in a 2001 Honda Civic this is what I found at eHow. The title of the page is How to Fix a Power Window in a Civic. The first two steps tell us how to check for a bad fuse, and then sort of remove the door panel, steps 3, 4 and 5 are priceless.

3 Look at the long, coiled piece of wire connecting the window to the metal window regulator. Replace the coil if rusted or broken. If the coil is intact, then scan the metal window regulator for loose or broken pieces. If a wheel or screw is out of place, then replace the piece.

4 Turn your car key to the “on” position again and press down on the power window button. If the window does not move, then replace the window regulator.

5 Return all removed housings to their appropriate places once the window is working.

This does not explain how to fix or replace a faulty power window regulator. Correct me if I’m missing something there. The website eHow is a joke. Maybe the editors of eHow need to start monitoring contributors more aggressively, tighten their guidelines. That’s assuming eHow actually has active human editors reviewing posted content. Based on what I’ve seen I doubt it.

Based on the drivel I’ve found on their website it seems obvious that eHow doesn’t even care, and is only concerned about the amount of content, not the quality of content. The only benefit in that scenario is that eHow gets more traffic and potential advertising revenue, without having to provide much useful content to the user.

Google needs to rethink sites like eHow.

More info: eHow Criticism

Problem Solved, for me. Hopefully this can help others who are having issues with iTunes on Windows not being seen by Apple TV on their wireless network.

The Problem
Not sure what happened, but at some point both of my Apple TVs stopped noticing iTunes hosted on a Windows XP machine with Home Sharing enabled, meanwhile they see my MacBook Pro iTunes library just fine. (Note: contrary to what some forum posters may say about clicking “Done” when turning on Home Sharing in iTunes on your windows PC — clicking “Done” does not stop the service, and should have absolutely no impact on whether or not your Apple TV sees the iTunes Library.)

The first, my Apple TV 2 stopped seeing the PC on the network shortly after I moved into a new home. I had purchased an Apple TV 3 to set up in another room and it too would not see the Windows hosted iTunes Library on our wireless network. Strange, and also annoying as hell since all of my movies and music are stored on there, and it was working fine before.

I have an older Dell Dimension 3000 which we use as a media server. It is bare bones, doesn’t have much software loaded in and I don’t use it for much but geeking out from time to time and hosting my iTunes library.

No changes were made to my setup, except the usual router firmware upgrades, Apple TV updates, and the new version of iTunes (11) which I updated to on the PC. The only variable I can think of that may have caused my problem is the firmware upgrade on the router, because it was a router setting that was at the root of my Home Sharing issue.

Solution
Note that both of my Apple TV units were seeing my iTunes library on my MacBook Pro with no problems, AND my MacBook Pro was able to see shared folders on the PC. The problem was not with the Apple TV, and it was not with my PC’s sharing setup.

It also was not with Bonjour on the PC. I uninstalled both Bonjour and iTunes, then reinstalled and the problem persisted.

I found the solution on my Actiontec router (we use Fios), and it had nothing to do with opening ports for Bonjour or the Apple TV, or anything like that. It was the IGMP Proxy setting. Even this article suggests turning it off.

Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) is used for management of multicast sources, for gaming and video mainly. Basically groups are created on the fly for clients viewing the same content so that the content server hosting the game or video source only has to send one stream of the content to that group. A router would redistribute the stream to the other group members.

That’s cool, but I don’t need it and it was causing problems with my Apple TV and PC talkng to each other, so I disabled it and voilà!

We just cleaned out the gutters in preparation for a deluge of rain that Sandy will be dumping on us later this weekend. We’re in the process of repairing our home from storm damage sustained earlier this year, and now we’re facing a big storm with much more potential for damage. It’s scary.

Two tall poplar trees had snapped at the top and landed, along with other large branches and trunks from a nearby maple, on our screened porch roof, side deck and in the yard. Damage included destroyed deck railings, a broken skylight, a couple of punctures in the roof, shingle damage and gutter damage.

I said we’re in the process of repairing, but realy we’re in the process of waiting for our storm damage to be repaired by a contractor working for Service Master, and we’re getting a little annoyed. It’s been four months since the damage occurred and no repairs had been made until last week, when a crew came out to replace plywood and put new shingles on the roof.

The broken gutters are still broken, and that is not ideal considering the storm we are facing. Will State Farm or Service Master be responsible for dwelling damage that may be caused by water going where it shouldn’t?

We can only do so much. One gutter is essentially sagging from the house, over loaded with leaves and standing water that smells like rat pee. I drilled a few holes to allow the water to drain, and scooped out the leaves.

Hopefully Sandy is gentle with us. Based on current data and the cone of uncertainty her eye could pass to our south and west, or north and east, or directly overhead. If she passes to the south and west we’ll face more damaging winds. Not looking forward to this.

Keeping my fingers crossed that our trees remain standing, in their entirety.