iScroll2: Worth It

December 23, 2005 — dlkinney

My wife received a new 12″ iBook for work a couple of months ago. It is a very nice computer and she simply loves it. Since I lug around a 17″ PowerBook with the same processor speed (1.33GHz), I didn’t vie for her shiny new machine too heavily.

However, I noticed that she was vertically scrolling her applications “the old fashioned way”, like have to on my PowerBook: by moving the mouse cursor to manipulate the scroll bar. I showed her how to scroll by using two fingers and she was ecstatic. A few days later that I observed that she had entirely converted to two-fingered-scrolling and that it was really working out for her.

Every once in a while, she would hand me the iBook to look at something on the screen, such as a Web site, and I would get to use the two-fingered scrolling. I started envying her that feature. It works so smoothly, so intuitively, I would find myself trying to use it when I returned to my PowerBook.

I tried gaining similar functionality using SideTrack but scrolling along the right side of the pad never clicked with me. I recalled seeing a couple of drivers for earlier iBooks and PowerBooks that mimicked the two-fingered scrolling. Performing a Google search I found iScroll2.

I’ve been using iScroll2 now for three weeks. It’s a good product and hasn’t demonstrated any undesirable side-effects on my PowerBook, which is running 10.4.3. It isn’t quite as smooth or slick as the native support in my wife’s iBook — in particular, it doesn’t alway’s “catch” when I’m using two fingers and it’s scrolling is a little jumpy when it does — but it is an adequate solution for me.

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Tivo Series2 First Setup Without Phone Line

December 14, 2005 — dlkinney

I just purchased a second Tivo Series2 and am happy to report that it is possible to perform the initial Guided Setup without a phone line!

My configuration:

Tivo unit’s service number: starts with 540

USB to Ethernet adapter: NetGear FA120

I have SpeakEasy VoIP for my phone service. Since I use VoIP, computer modems will not work for me. This could have presented a major hurdle since Tivo’s site is adamant that the first connection must be performed by phone. However, Tivo’s customer service site has this excellent advice for repeating the Guided Setup using an Internet connection.

First I setup the Tivo’s cabling to the cable box, television, home network, and power. Then I proceeded through the initial Guided Setup. When I got to the “Welcome!” screen (”You are about to begin Guided Setup…”), I picked up on Step 3 of the instructions from Tivo’s Customer Service site. The short of it is to go into Dialing Options > Set Dial Prefix and enter the value ,#401 (comma-pound-four-zero-one). Then proceed normally and when the Tivo attempts to connect, it will use the Internet instead of the phone line (which I never bothered to plug in anyway).

Posted in HowTo. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Another Christmas with Labels

December 6, 2005 — dlkinney

Another year, another set of Christmas labels to print. If you recall, my wife likes the labels to families to be printed to “John & Jane Smith” or “The Smith Family”, depending on whether the recipients have children. Thus, it is not a direct export from Address Book and needs to be scripted.

In previous years, I used an AppleScript that I wrote to dump the information to an AppleWorks database and use its label printing tools from there. I no longer have AppleWorks installed, so I needed to find another way to automatically print labels to my wife’s standards. The latest version of Office for Mac is very AppleScript-friendly, but I grew frustrated trying to figure out how to dump the content to an Excel spreadsheet. Then I read a review about Mail Factory, which is a dedicated labels and envelopes solution. It imports from a comma separated text file, so I just rigged my old AppleScript to dump its values to TextEdit. This worked marvelously.

While playing with Mail Factory, I noticed that it has the ability to display an address as “John and Jane Smith” or “The Smith Family”, which can be set separately for each address imported. The application is AppleScript-able, so I may take the time to re-write my script to have Mail Factory import directly from Address Book and set the label’s content appropriately. This would cut out the middle step of writing a text file.

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