Category: Application

Google Earth 4.1

Upgraded from 3.1. Google Earth 4.1 has some new features (what are they?) and has a new navigation control panel:

Google Earth 4.1

The old one looked like this:

Google Earth 3.1

So far, perhaps until I get used to it, the old version seems to operate much more smoothly.

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Complaints!

1) My keyboard often produces double strikes like thiis. In System Preferences, setting Delay Until Repeat to Long doesn’t solve the problem!

2) Apple Mail: Point, press, drag and release the mouse cursor over the messages. This action will sometimes move one message, and at other times simply select a batch of messages. It seems there is NO consistency, but eventually, with patience, persistence, and experimentation, I figured out what is going on. So, my complaint now is that this message-selection-move process isn’t covered in the Help menu.

3) Spotlight: Yeah, cool, shows everything and then some, more than needed. It’s infinitely configurable, of course, but I just want to simply find the file I happen to know the name of. How do I make it work like the straight-forward Find utility of yore? And why should I even have to ask that question? Shouldn’t a simple file-name find be the default configuration until I actually need all those bells and whistles?

4) As long as I’m on this tirade, remember in those days of yore when inserting a diskette of an unrecognized format provoked a dialog box asking if you wanted to REFORMAT! Who’s the blankety-blank who came up with that stupid idea? I know it’s ruined some lives!

Incoming Caller-ID Information Monitor

Jon’s Phone Tool (JPT) is the app I’m now testing and using to display caller-id. It has scripts to dial the phone from within FMP, but I’ve yet to figure a way to extract, from incoming calls, the data displayed.

JPT is a lot too fancy for my taste. If I had the raw code, I’d make the caller-id data append directly into a simple tab-delimited text file. Because JPT also has extensive AppleScript support, that may yet be possible. However, the 14 day free trial period is enough to convince me to look elsewhere.

Hello, you’ve reached MotorolaSM56K

Just signed up with AT&T for caller-id. Plugged the phone line into the modem on back of the computer and installed Silica.

The first few times I called from another line, to test the connection, Silica operated as specified: Little window pops up on desktop showing name and number of caller. Then it got inconsistent, followed by non existent. What was the problem? There are rumors about Mac internal modems being not of the highest quality because hardly any one uses them anymore, but I did see it working, at first.

Going to Terminal, I used the screen command to view the modem session:

screen /dev/tty.modem

It replied “Resource busy. Sorry, could not find a PTY.”

Oops! I went back to Silica’s Settings, stopped the service, then re-entered the screen command in Terminal, and got the expected blank screen.

Calling from my other phone, I saw the modem detect the call:

RING

RING

So, it’s not a hardware problem. To be continued (I’ll figure it out)…

BTW: To quit (kill) the screen window manager, use Cntrl-a k.