My Mac Hero | digital scribe

Photo credit: flickr/Tricia Shears

Apple is not known for detailed release notes (in fact, they are quite often brief to the point of being useless). So it is quite welcome that after yesterday’s WWDC keynote, Apple posted a long list of “Enhancements and refinements” providing quite a bit of detail on what to expect this September, when Snow Leopard is uncaged.

Forthwith, the features I am personally most looking forward to in Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”:

Finder

More and better Spotlight search intelligence!

More reliable disk eject.

Core system services such as Spotlight indexing and file system events will intelligently stop their work so you can remove your drive. And improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Removable sidebar headers.

If you remove the items under the Devices, Places, or Search For header in the sidebar, the header will disappear, too. To add it back, simply drag an item into the sidebar.

Dock

Activate Exposé from the Dock. It sounds useful, but I will have to see it in action to know how it actually works.

System Wide

Faster shutdown and wake-up.

Automatic updates for printer drivers.

Redesigned Services menu.

The Services menu has been streamlined, displaying only the services relevant to the application or content you’re using. You can customize the Services menu, and you can create your own services using Automator.

Bidirectional text. This I have to see!

For languages that are written right to left, such as Hebrew and Arabic, Snow Leopard now elegantly handles mixing in left-to-right text. It also has a split-cursor option that shows the appropriate cursor direction at the boundary between right-to-left and left-to-right text.

AirPort menu signal strength.

The AirPort item in the menu bar now includes signal strength for all available wireless networks, so you can see which access point has the best signal before selecting it.

All-new thesaurus.

Snow Leopard includes the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus second edition.

QuickTime X

QuickTime sure has come a long way since I first saw it in beta in 1991.

Mail and iCal

Reorderable Mail sidebar. So you can choose the order in which accounts appear.

Automatic setup (of Google and Yahoo calendars) in iCal

Omnipresent inspector in iCal.

System Preferences

Multi-Touch gestures in older Mac models. Here’s one where I wish I had more information about which models have “Multi-Touch”; my 2006-era MacBook Pro supports two-finger scrolling, but I’m not sure yet that it will automagically gain new powers under Snow Leopard.

Installation

Faster, more reliable installer.

Smaller footprint. Additionally, new apps requiring 10.6 should generally shrink, since they will no longer include PowerPC code.

Again, these are just things that I’m especially interested in—there are many, many more major features (especially under the hood) and usability enhancements that I’m not even mentioning here.

In conclusion, I expect Snow Leopard to be both noticeably faster, more stable, and yes, more fun and productive to use. We Mac OS X users have been repeatedly spoiled by software releases that make our computers faster than when we first bought them!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Snow Leopard

A brief interruption to our irregularly scheduled programming:

Ingredients

Per pound of thinly sliced, lean beef—

2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp rice wine (I use Kikkoman Aji-Mirin)
2.5 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp water
1 clove crushed garlic
2 medium green onions, finely chopped
1 tsp sesame seed
1/8 tsp ground black pepper

Instructions

0. Wash hands well!
1. In a bowl, mix the sugar with the liquid ingredients until dissolved. Then mix in the garlic, green onion slices, sesame seeds, and black pepper.
2. Take a slice at a time of the beef and pat it into the marinade, mixing the sauce and the meat evenly.
3. Cover and refrigerate several hours or overnight.
4. Pan fry, optionally with sliced mushrooms, which soak up the juices!
5. Enjoy with rice, kimchi, and your favorite beverages!

Here is the recipe in plain text format for easy import into some database-type app (I actually keep it as a “Company”-style card in my Address Book with the recipe details in the Note field).

Technorati Tags: recipe, how-to, korean

I just saw an ad a couple days ago for a 1.5 terabyte drive for $115, which works out to over eight gigabytes per dollar (approximately the amount of storage you get in a free Google Mail account). I paid about $170 for a drive half that size two Black Fridays ago. Twenty years ago, it was inconceivable that ordinary people would have access to anything resembling a gigabyte of hard disk storage.

For many of us, though, our digital data (primarily text documents, images, audio, and video) has ballooned to fill up the hard drives in our computers, requiring the purchase of extra drives for storage and backup. If you find your Mac is starting to get dramatically sluggish and even giving you dire warnings about low disk space, it’s time to do some spring cleaning.

You can start by archiving data (e.g., burning it to a CD or DVD), moving data to another storage device, or simply deleting it if you truly don’t need it any more. These operations, especially when they involve many gigabytes of data, can take time to do and may sometimes require making difficult decisions, so if you need to defer them, here are some suggestions for freeing up space posthaste.

I would start by downloading and running a utility like the shareware Cocktail (run its default “Pilot” script) or freeware Onyx (execute the default “Automation” script) to clean your system caches and reboot. This will often free up several hundred megabytes or more of space and is the equivalent of a tune-up or oil change. I do this myself about once a month or so.

Several other utilities that can help with removing unnecessary files:

Monolingual [freeware] deletes unused foreign language resources (but doesn’t affect display of foreign scripts). Depending on the software you have installed, it will save you several hundred megabytes up to several gigabytes. YMMV.

Grand Perspective [freeware] lets you see visually which folders/files take up the most space. This one should be used with caution, or not at all. Similar utilities which present size data in different ways include WhatSize [shareware] and the recently emancipated OmniDiskSweeper.

For finding and processing duplicates of all kinds, I’ve found nothing better than Tidy Up! (currently $30 for the just-released version 2), but you will probably need to read the manual since what it is doing is not trivial. If you only need iTunes duplicates processing, check out the $15 utility Dupin.

In any case, don’t wait too long to address the primary causes of your low drive space syndrome!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Mac, Tips, Storage

So they went out and fled from the tomb,
for terror and amazement had seized them;
and they said nothing to anyone,
for they were afraid. [ἐφοβοῦντο γάρ.]
Mark 16.8

Look, I have set before you an open door,
which no one is able to shut.
Revelation 3.8

in memory of a beloved teacher,
Donald Harrisville Juel
1942–2003

I love digital books because of factors like searchability and portability, and, increasingly, cost.¹

Like many people, though, I still love printed matter for many reasons: the sensory qualities of ink and paper; the physical gestures of opening, paging, fanning, marking, dog-earing, and closing; the aesthetic delights of a well-designed page; and, yes, the nerdy pleasure of knowing that today's book is a legacy of the ancient codex. I have given and received many special books over the years, and can attest that the appeal of a great book is often enhanced by the materials from which it is constructed.

That said, there is one critical area in which digital books, particularly those representing conversions of older printed sources, frequently fail: accuracy. And when accuracy matters, as it does especially for reference works like grammars and dictionaries, extra caution must be exercised, including checking references in digital versions against "canonical" print sources (themselves of course not free of errors).²

So each medium will undoubtedly have its place for the foreseeable future, with digital books eventually becoming ubiquitous. With respect to traditional publishing, then, I've enjoyed working on some very interesting and challenging projects:

Since the late 1990s, I have contributed custom fonts (using Fontographer) to the Princeton Theological Seminary Dead Sea Scrolls Project, which has been publishing critical editions of the scrolls since 1994. If you ever meet a "Nabatean qoph," chances are good that I created the electronic version of it!

From 2002–2005, I coordinated the final stages of research, writing, and editing of

Hebrew Inscriptions: Texts from the Biblical Period of the Monarchy with Concordance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

In 2004, I typeset and indexed Patrick D. Miller's

The Way of the Lord: Essays in Old Testament Theology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004). [publisher | LOC | WorldCat] (Reprinted, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007). [publisher | LOC | WorldCat]

"The Right Chorale": Studies in Biblical Law and Interpretation (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge University Press, 2008) [publisher | LOC | WorldCat].

My most recent project, primarily using Adobe InDesign CS3 Middle Eastern, was typesetting and assisting in the design of Mahdi Alosh and Allen Clark's

Ahlan wa Sahlan: Functional Modern Standard Arabic for Beginners, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). [publisher]

As proud as I am of the creative, technical labor that went into producing these twenty-first century books, I am at the same time acutely aware that the software tools we use for typesetting today still fall short of the standards of elegance and typographical accuracy that were achieved a century ago by expert typesetters. I think especially of the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906) and the labors of Horace Hart and J. C. Pembrey, singled out by the illustrious editors in the Preface. There is as yet no entirely satisfactory digital edition of this still-important work, though this is probably the best surrogate for now.

Long live paper!

¹ Yes, I would love a Kindle 2 or Sony PRS-505 for all these reasons, except that the bar of the cost of the device is still too high. Despite Steve Jobs' poo-pooing of reading, I think it's only a matter of time before we will see Kindle software running on an Apple portable with a larger screen than the iPhone.

² In fact, in cases where the paper originals are exceedingly complex, I would prefer to have a digital facsimile (e.g., high resolution scans to PDF) to a more searchable format that has been run through optical character recognition software and an editorial proofing process (ideally, such a process would be like the one described by the Chadwyck-Healey publishing team, but the truth is not everyone cares that much or can afford to proofread, and so as generally with the web, search with a grain of salt!).

Examples of facsimile-type editions include an online searchable graphical version of J. Payne Smith's 1903 Compendious Syriac Dictionary, E. W. Lane's never-completed, but still useful 1863 Arabic-English Lexicon, as well as the array of resources at Tyndale Archive of Biblical Studies. For Greek and Latin, Project Perseus has some very useful tools.

The searchable books in Amazon and Google Books have trouble with non-Latin scripts and even simple Latin diacritics (e.g., tôrâ for Torah).

UPDATES:

02-Apr-09: added Patrick D. Miller's The Way of the Lord.

04-Apr-09: added links to various editions of classical language reference works.

Technorati Tags: adobe indesign, apple, ebooks, fontographer, kindle, microsoft word, research, scholarship, sony, typesetting, steve jobs

Two people I know have had their MacBooks stolen this month from customarily safe locations (a church campus and a small rural college library), and I’ve received a couple of suspicious phone calls and emails from purported prospective clients who want help with issues like “lost passwords.”

While the advice I offer here is too late for my recently bereaved friends, given the possible connection between the recession and these crimes, I want to emphasize at least four specific things (in addition to the need to back up!) you can do to discourage theft and minimize the possibility that your personal and sensitive data will be compromised.

1. Use a steel, keyed lock. I recommend the Kensington Microsaver DS. It’s clear that you shouldn’t leave your equipment alone for a minute in public these days.

2. Use strong passwords [tips]. On a Mac, this entails at least three more things:
   
   (a) do not leave any user accounts without a password;
   (b) disable automatic login, and
   (c) require a password to wake the computer from sleep or screen saver.
   
   The latter two settings are found in the Security preference pane. Note, however, that anyone with physical access to the MacBook’s drive can pull the drive or use Target Disk Mode to freely read its contents, so passwords can only be considered a minor deterrent, effective only against casual thieves.

3. Use encryption. The set-it-and-forget-it encryption method built into OS X is called FileVault. The chief disadvantage to using FileVault is that it is not fully compatible with Time Machine (whose virtues I extolled in a previous post), but the point is that it makes it near impossible for a thief to read the contents of your home directory (and unlike the scenarios in #2, access to the drive is no practical advantage to the thief). In practice, it will come down to the tradeoff between the security FileVault offers and convenience of Time Machine.

4. If you want to stage a Hollywood thriller, you need to maximize the remote (both senses of the word!) possibility of recovering data from and otherwise manipulating a stolen computer. One good bet is to have a MobileMe account registered on the machine with Back to My Mac enabled (requires Leopard), which can allow remote control and file access when the computer surfaces on the internet.
   
   A free solution involves rigging iChat to automatically accept screen-sharing requests (I can verify this works, but it does require iChat to be logged in).
   
   Commercial solutions to aid in laptop recovery (with which I have no personal experience) include Orbicule’s Undercover and Computrace’s LoJack for Laptops.

These are just four things you can do. Other helpful suggestions can be found at a similarly motivated post by Brian at FreeMacBlog.com. Caveat lector!

p.s. I leave you with this quote from Georges Bernanos, which I read in Jacques Ellul’s Reason for Being: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes:

In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive,
we must first lose hope in everything that deceives.

Technorati Tags: Mac, Time Machine, FileVault, Apple, Tips, Security, Antitheft, Encryption

Highlights of today’s slew of releases out of the Infinite Loop:

Airport Extreme and Time Capsule: (1) simultaneous dual band support (so 2.4GHz and 5GHz devices can operate at full speed in their respective channels instead of being subject to performance at the most primitive device’s characteristics), (2) guest networking, and (3) remote sharing of attached storage via MobileMe (“your own personal file server wherever you go”).

Tip: Airport Extreme + 1TB or 2TB drive > Time Capsule.

Mac mini (specs): 4GB RAM limit (6GB may be the true limit), Mini DisplayPort, and Firewire 800. The mini is still alive and kicking!

iMac (specs): 8GB RAM limit; $1499 price point for the entry-level 24” (I love our early 2008 vintage 24” iMac). The new compact wired keyboard? OK, but not one I’d enjoy typing on for long periods of time.

MacBook Pro (specs): 2.93GHz processor option; 8GB RAM limit for 17”. Hot!

Mac Pro (specs). ~2X performance boost over previous-generation Mac Pros.

Worth remembering for anyone who is on the fence about buying now: all of these computers will see significant performance boosts when 64-bit Snow Leopard ships on them later this year and takes fuller advantage of the gigaflops within. Of course, you can buy now and upgrade later for $129, if history is any guide.

Bottom line? Today we’re seeing the natural evolution of hardware, as expected, but the real excitement is in software. Still waiting for: Apple TV, take 3; Blu-ray; Snow Leopard; and devices X, Y, and Z.

Technorati Tags: apple, mac

MIT Media Lab founding director Nicholas Negroponte starts his 1995 Being Digital with a story about answering a corporate receptionist’s question about the value of his PowerBook. He declared its value at “between one and two million dollars” (for “the bits”); she wrote down instead: $2,000 (for “the atoms”).

Over the years, some of the most painful losses my friends have sustained involved digital data: a dissertation-in-progress on a laptop stolen out of a library carrel and family photos on a crashed hard drive. An earlier version of the dissertation existed in hardcopy, but the photos (if not the memories) are gone. (Yes, companies like DriveSavers with dedicated clean rooms for open-drive surgery exist, if you can justify the expense.)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve helped people recover data, including several episodes this past month. So let me say it loud and clear: BACK UP YOUR DATA! If it’s valuable to you, it should NOT exist in only one location or even in only one format.

Ten or fifteen years ago, it would have been expensive and time-consuming to keep an entire computer or even a small set of files regularly backed up and archived. Now, thankfully, keeping regular backups is trivially easy, and you have no excuses not to do so.

So, what can you do if you aren’t actively backing up? You really should go straight to #3 below, but you may get some ideas for safer computing from the first two scenarios.

1. Move your data to the internet, using web services such as Google’s Docs, Calendar, Picasa, and YouTube; Yahoo’s Flickr; and using social bookmarking. Many have already done this with email, jettisoning desktop clients for the ubiquity of a web browser. People who currently travel for work with just a netbook or smartphone prove that this approach can work. Bottom line: migrating data to the internet comes with its own limitations and risks and does not constitute a true backup strategy.

2. A hybrid approach stores some data on the internet while still doing most of the heavy lifting on a laptop or desktop. Here, I recommend two things:
   
   i. Use Dropbox, which makes synchronizing and sharing files across devices and platforms a snap (2GB free, with data hosted using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service), is a killer app that needs little justification. I find Dropbox preferable to USB flash drives, which, while cheap, are also much more fragile and prone to loss. [Read an interview with Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston.]
   
   ii. Email yourself copies of your work in progress, so the copies live on a server. I would even set up a separate email account reserved for safekeeping; with nearly 8GB of storage for a Google Mail account, you can store a lot of copies of your opera. The weakness here is that you have to remember to do this yourself, and if, like me, you have trouble flossing regularly…

3. The easiest genuine backup solution is to use an external drive and automated backup software (for Mac users, the clear choice is Time Machine, the single best reason to upgrade to Leopard, if you haven’t yet. Go ahead, make fun of the interface, but it works well and is simple enough). If possible, I would augment such backups with:
   
   i. periodic clones of your boot drive (using either SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner) and
   
   ii. periodic archives burned to recordable optical media and stored off-site. I have copies of family pictures on DVDs stored at my parents’ on the other side of the country, for example. (No, I don’t think I’m really paranoid. But yes, I do use a mirrored RAID array for my local copies of the files.)

So what should you get if you don’t have a backup drive (or two… or three…)?

$100 now buys a terabyte of storage (that’s 1,000 gigabytes, which is a LOT of documents, music, photos, etc.) in desktop-sized drives and about 500GB in portable drives. Costco typically has very good prices on Western Digital drives.

For more durable portable enclosures, I have tried and liked (in ascending cost) the LaCie Rugged portable drives (which have USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 interfaces), OWC Mercury On-The-Go drives, and the WiebeTech ToughTech Mini drives.

p.s. The day will come when we will dispense with physical drives and everything will be stored wirelessly on the network, but until then, hard drives will remain synonymous with primary storage. Even so, we should realize that these backup strategies are only viable as long as software and hardware exists that can access and render the information we have on various media. How many of us still have—let alone use—tape decks and turntables?

p.p.s. From the newer-is-not-necessarily-better department: the vast majority of extant writings from the Bronze and Iron Ages are clay and stone inscriptions. Interestingly enough, the ancient Sumerians had a simple metadata markup scheme in cuneiform that predates SGML by, oh, five thousand years.

p.p.p.s. Other titles I considered for this post included “History Will Teach Us Nothing,” “Too Much Information,” and “Why Should I Cry for You?”

Technorati Tags: Time Machine, Mac

The original instructions from the Facebook meme:

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

The list itself:

1. I was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, and grew up in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. I still want to travel through South America, India, Australia, and Antarctica.

2. I gave my little sisters haircuts when I was about four or five. I did not do a good job.

3. One of my favorite books of all time is Charlotte’s Web.

4. When I was in the third or fourth grade, I wrote a letter to President Carter. I was thrilled to receive a thick packet in the mail from the White House a couple months later.

5. My favorite toy growing up was the Texas Instruments Speak & Spell that my dad bought on a trip to the U.S. in the 1980s. (I’ve since found one for my daughters on eBay.)

6. My first album was a copy of REO Speedwagon’s Hi Infidelity (taped for me by a Menonnite missionary kid who had to use a marker to black out the LP cover model’s skin). The first cassette I bought with my own money was The Police’s Synchronicity. No, I did not get to see them on their reunion tour.

7. I will never forget how to spell “delicious” and “twelfth” (two words that I misspelled in bees) or “megalopolis” and “ottoman” (the two words on which I won).

8. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to become a paleontologist or open-heart surgeon (because of biographies of Roy Chapman Andrews and Christiaan Barnard) until I had a taste of (programming) an Apple (][ plus, to be precise).

9. In 1983, when I was in seventh grade, I wrote Apple with an offer to write software for their $9,995 Lisa computer if they would give me one. I got a letter back from their “Kids Can’t Wait” division.

10. In 1985, I was (I believe) the first American-born Korean to visit North Korea. My wife still occasionally suspects that I am a spy.

11. I got my first email account in 1986, on the TWiCS Beeline BBS in Japan.

12. I failed a couple of math tests in the fall semester of Algebra II/Trigonometry, so I spent the winter vacation figuring out what I had done wrong. After that, math became one of my favorite subjects. Differential equations with theory at MIT with a European graduate student whose accent I had a hard time deciphering cured my fever.

13. I once asked my high school social studies teacher in a moment of frustration, “What is history good for?” (My doctoral dissertation was an exercise in historical linguistics.)

14. My first “real” concert was Wynton Marsalis. My second concert was Metallica (the … And Justice For All tour, spring 1989). My ears rang for days afterwards, probably because I took out my earplugs about halfway through the show.

15. If I were stranded on the proverbial deserted island, and could only have one record with me, it would be Phil Keaggy’s Beyond Nature (bonus: the recording engineer’s notes!)

16. I first studied the ancient Canaanite language of Ugaritic with a Chinese professor, using grammars (Gordon, Segert, and Sivan) written in English and a glossary that was in Spanish.

17. I watched the first two Anne of Green Gables movies in preparation for my honeymoon on Prince Edward Island.

18. I once spent about six months researching and thinking about one word (“city”).

19. I make a mean kimchi jjigae and bulgogi.

20. I’ve eaten camel (in the Western Sahara [note: I did not eat any of the ones pictured]) and eaten dog and drunk fermented horse milk (in Central Asia).

21. My dream car used to be the Acura NSX. Now I enjoy driving a Honda Odyssey.

22. I’m a proud alumnus of Big Nerd Ranch (specifically, their Objective-C and Cocoa Boot Camp).

23. I am a Mac hero! :)

24. I’ve made peace with the fact that I will never find all the answers I seek, so I’ve learned to really appreciate the questions.

25. I haven’t felt lonely since I met Keren. I still sometimes can’t believe that I convinced her to marry me!

We now return you to your irregularly scheduled programming…

Note: Keep track of iPhone apps via apptism and App Store price drops and freebies via dealnews, where you can also set up email alerts or RSS feeds.

Without further ado, here’s an alphabetical list of iPhone/iPod touch apps that I’ve found worth considering.  indicates exceptionally beautiful interfaces.

Amazon Mobile FREE

BibleReader FREE

Big StopWatch FREE 

Buddha Machine (ambient sounds)

CameraBag (virtual camera filters)

Cleartune (chromatic tuner)

Deep Green (chess app) 

Facebook FREE

FingerPiano (and MiniPiano FREE)

iStat (iPhone and remote system monitoring)

iTalk (audio recorder) FREE

Koi Pond (simulator)

Mach Dice (simulator)

NetNewsWire RSS reader FREE

Ocarina (virtual instrument)

Pandora (radio)

PocketGuitar (virtual instrument)

SpeedTest.Net client (connection stats) FREE

Things (for Getting Things Done)

Tweetie (Twitter client)

Weightbot 

Last updated: February 8, 2009.

Technorati Tags: apple, iphone, favorites