Radiant Comics

Let’s here it for Apple’s “Migration Assistant”. It isn’t needed very often but when it is it really does the job. Y’see I decided to upgrade to Apple’s new “Leopard” operating system (OS 10.5). It wasn’t an easy decision because it involved some hardware changes for me. Well, that and money. I’m not made of the stuff.

I’m running a 2002 Dual 1 Ghz Quicksilver model. I’ve already upgraded it many times over the years and it has two internal hard drives. The original stock 80 gig drive and a second 250 gig drive. I run the operating system off of the 80 gig drive and the other is set up with a clean and basic back up operating system in case I have problems and have to trouble shoot. The problem is that the 80 gig drive is just about full. As an artist who scans in a lot of my stuff and also dabbles in photography I can really fill up a drive. I’m not sure if there was even room to install OS 10.5. I’d be pushing the envelope.

Buying a new internal hard drive was part of my decision making process. Had to be done as part of the OS upgrade. It drove the price of upgrading up but in the end I decided I needed a new internal hard drive anyway so away I went. I ordered a 250 gig internal hard drive, a USB enclosure for the old internal drive, and Leopard. Then I waited until the end of the week after all my work was done to do an install.

The first thing I had to do was open my machine up and pull out the hard drives. The top hard drive (250 gig) came out easy enough. After all I put it in so I knew how to take it out. The primary hard drive (80 gig) was a little trickier. It took me a few minutes to find the screw that held it in. It was under the cable that connected to the drive. I only found it by looking underneath the computer’s tower case and seeing a bottom bolt. Once found it came out easy. So I made the old 250 gig drive the primary drive and the new one the secondary drive. Then it was a reboot and I had to format the drive. Piece of cake.

I had one bad run at installing OS 10.5. It was my own fault because you’re not supposed to install an operating system with peripherals attached to it and I tried to install from a peripheral. Yeah, Yeah, I know, but I always use my external 16x DVD drive because it’s so my faster the the original 2x internal drive. And as I figured the install went faster. Until it failed. Then I unplugged everything and tried again from the internal DVD drive. Everything went fine but slower. Install was successful.

This is where Migration Assistant comes in. Since I was installing on a totally new hard drive none of my previous information was there. But I had purchased a USB enclosure and put the old 80 gig drive into it and now I plugged that into my tower (as an external hard drive). I fired up the migration program and it spotted the external drive and asked if I wanted to copy over my user information. I said yes and it copied all of my documents, applications, passwords, settings, and you name its. This took about two hours as there was about 70 gigs worth of stuff. But, wow, does it save time. I had to set up next to nothing. It was all there just as I left it and ready to go.

When I fired up the old beast all I had to do was update a couple of things. The Wacom tablet seems to be the one thing that always needs a driver update with each new system. Luckily there was one so I downloaded it and things were good. I checked my scanner and printer. Those are the two big things I had to get working and they’re doing fine (big ups to VueScan software). The whole upgrade took me from about 4 PM until 8:30 PM. I ate dinner in there too so it wasn’t too long.

One strange thing was that even though I had administer privileges I had to type a password to write to my primary 250 gig drive (the old one). I hit “command I” to get info on the drive and though I could give myself write privileges to individual folders I couldn’t give myself write privileges for the whole drive. I had to tell the computer to “ignore ownership” of the drive in order to give myself unfettered access to it. I didn’t have to do this with my external drives though. Weird.

I can’t give any kind of review of Leopard yet since I’ve barely used it but my review of the Migration Assistant program is ten out of ten stars. Man does it take the pain out of upgrading. You can even use it if you are buying a new computer. As long as the old and new computers have Firewire (though my external hard drive was USB 2 and that worked fine) you can connect them together and copy everything from the old one onto the new one. It make things painless. I like painless.

Crap. It’s the end of my bike riding season. For outdoor bike riding that is. Time to move things inside to the stationary bike. Blech! I hate the stationary bike. What rider doesn’t? It’s too boring. I’d much rather be outside riding the real thing with the air and scenery going by. But now it’s getting too cold. I hate riding a bike in the cold. Besides being real cold it saps my strength like you wouldn’t believe. My last ride was earlier this week and it was 38º F out. I had to cut it short. It was too much effort to ride. Exhausting. I was tired after that short ride. I pushed through on a cold ride a couple of days earlier and payed the price of fatigue for the rest of the day. Can’t do that anymore.

Mornings are my time to exercise so I have a tough time waiting for the afternoons to roll around when the day warms up a little. I could ride for a couple of more weeks in the afternoons but I have much less energy in the afternoons. Besides it doesn’t warm up that much because these autumn winds are cold. I even got myself a windbreaker this year and it works well. It’s much warmer with it on but the cold still saps my strength. I wasn’t actually too cold but too weak. I guess when the body’s energy has to be used to keep warm there is less of it for the legs. I’d have to warm up a lot first to keep my strength up. That would take even more time.

There is also something to be said about the psychological factor of winter coming compared to spring. Cycling in the cold of the early spring is easier because I know that the mornings will be getting warmer day by day. That’s something to look forward to. In the winter it’s the opposite. I keep wondering, “Is this the day that will be too cold?”. That’s a distraction. You don’t want those out on the road. Snow, ice, and wind aren’t very good either. It can be tough to cycle in a warm wind and in a cold one near impossible.

So now I’ll sit in one place and pedal. I’ll watch some TV while I do this but that still doesn’t make it very interesting. It’s less exercise in the same amount of time too. When I’m out on the road I go up some pretty big hills. I can turn the resistance up on the stationary bike and pedal harder but it’s not the same. It takes more effort but less concentration to go up a real hill on a real bike. After all, I have no choice. I have to keep going or I won’t get home. My legs will keep on pedaling even if I’m not as focused as I could be. On the stationary bike if I get a little tired and lose concentration I can just stop pedaling or turn down the resistance. And it’s easy to lose concentration when you’re going no where.

I think I’ll start hitting the stationary bike in the morning and taking a walk in the afternoon. After all my bike ride also serves to get me out of the house and away from the computer screen or the drawing board for a while. Otherwise I’m inside all day and that can lead to a bit of cabin fever. Especially in the winter time. And here comes the ol’ papa winter to say hello.

I am a big fan of mint. From the plant grown in the ground to all the stuff flavored by it I dig it all. As long as it’s good and minty.

For a long time I was a big Altoids fan. I discovered them in the early 90’s before they were widely available. They only place I ever saw them in those days was in little tobacco shops around Manhattan. It’s a wonder I found them at all being that I don’t smoke but I think I wandered in there with a friend who did. The “Curiously Strong” slogan caught my eye and I bought some. Good stuff. The first of the strong stuff flavored with real mint.

I say I was an Altoids fan because I don’t eat them much anymore. A few years ago I started finding them curiously weak. All the tins I purchased were stale and wimpy. It didn’t matter what store I bought them in they weren’t any good. I don’t know if it’s because they changed them or that quality control has gone down hill. Either way I’m off of them. It’s a shame really because they were so good. A lot of my friends still find them good so maybe I have gotten quite a few bad tins. Who knows? It’s enough to keep me away though.

White Tic Tacs are also a favorite of mine. They’re changed their recipe over the years but I still like them. They’re one of the only “sugar mints” that I like. Except they have a strange after taste. That leads to eating mint after mint because the beginning taste is better. I do find that if I eat two white with one red (cinnamon) Tic Tac it improves the flavor all around. I carry a box of them with just that ratio when I’m out.

I’m not really a gum person but I have been chewing some mint gum lately. The explosion of super strong mints that Altoids lead a decade ago found its way into the gum world recently. They now have a variety of super minty gums. I’ve been chewing Eclipse brand and I’ve tried a few others that are good too. The flavor lasts a while and even reaches to the edge of my chewing patience. About fifteen minutes or so. That’s longer lasting flavor than the typical mint.

If you’re a real fan of mint you have to try the Tom’s of Maine spearmint mouthwash. I use their toothpaste, which also comes in a variety of natural mint flavors, and one tube came with a sample of the afore mentioned mouthwash. It’s strong with a natural spearmint kick that will get you going. I was never a mouthwash user but I keep some of this stuff around because it tastes so good.

And now a word on the mints I don’t like. “Sugar mints”. They’re the kind, like Lifesavers, that have been around for years. They say they’re mint flavored but they are really sugar flavored with some mint thrown in. I’m glad Altoids changed the mint landscape because this used to be all we had.

I also can’t stand all of the “chemical mints” that have proliferated since Altoids. These mints are supposed to be super strong but don’t contain any actual mint. They’re made from some chemical flavoring that tries to mimic mint but just tastes artificial to me. Usually these are found in some gimmicky packaging and the mints are an afterthought.

Wintergreen mints. These are not real mints. They’re the original chemical mint but they’re been around so long that people accept them as one of the basic mint flavors. I never could stand these. They taste like they were made in a lab to me. I’ve also noticed that this is the favorite mint of people who don’t like mints. I guess that makes sense being that it’s not a real mint but I’ve always found that odd.

Who would have thunk that I’d have so many thought on mints? Just another little bit of insight into being me.

Let me continue the tale of my new iPod Touch that I started last week. After I set it up with all of my photos I began to load all of my little digital camera videos from over the years. Nothing long; just short movies of friends and family at parties, gatherings and outings. I had already converted them to mp4’s (the video format that iPods use) but that’s when things got confusing. You can’t sync folders of video like you can photos. Apple assumes all the videos you will load onto your iPod are movies, TV shows, or music videos. You have to use iTunes to organize those and there is no section for home video. This is where iTunes really lets me down. I can see how adding video organization to iTunes was an afterthought.

First off I loaded the video into iTunes but since they are my home videos there is no metadata in them for iTunes to read. So I had to enter all the information about my video (date, place, event, people) into the iTunes song info slots. That took a little adapting on my part (making the album name the date of the photo) but I got it all entered and things lined up right. I copied them onto the iPod and that’s when things went haywire. Organizational wise that is.

The first thing I noticed was orientation. Like my photos sometimes I take movies horizontally and sometimes vertically. But the movie always comes off the memory card horizontal. No problem. I just rotate the movie clockwise and nobody is on their side. When I saved all of my movies as mp4’s I rotated them to the correct orientation. When viewing them in iTunes everything was fine. The vertical ones were vertical and the horizontal ones were horizontal. But when I looked at then on the iPod it had turned all of the vertical ones horizontal. That’s horizontal across the small width of the iPod. They were tiny and not watch-able. Especially compared to the nice big horizontal ones.

I did a quick test and sure enough the iPod auto-detects which movies are vertical and reorients them. But iTunes, which I have to manage the video with, doesn’t! I had to go back and re-save the vertical ones horizontal. Now I have two copies of each of them in iTunes one vertical for iTunes and one horizontal for the iPod. Annoying. Maybe there is some preference buried in iTunes to handle this but I couldn’t find it.

Once that was done I noticed that the organization wasn’t what I wanted it to be. The movies were arranged by date (which I had in the album name slot) but none of them were arranged into folders like an album is when they’re music files. All the videos were in one big list. I went back into iTunes and dug around. It turns out there is another tab named “video” amongst the music info. There are only five fields there for show name, episode ID, season number, episode number, and a pull down to indicate TV, movie, or music video. Hmmm…

I decided to name the show as the date the video was taken, the episode ID with the event, and make them all “TV Shows” in the pull down menu. Oh, by the way, there were 121 videos I had to do this for. That’s after already filling in the song metadata for all of them and then refilling in that data on the about thirty of them that I had to re-save as horizontal. What a pain. But when I put them on the iPod they were all in folders lined up by their dates.

Another stranger thing is that the names on the iPod video folders (the date taken) is actually the name of the album from the iTunes song data not the TV show name from the iTunes video data. I only know this because a couple of times I put a person’s name after the date taken in the iTunes “show name” data field and that name didn’t show up in the folder name on the iPod. I put that name after the date taken in the iTunes “album name” data field and sure enough it showed in the folder name. Weird. I’d think it would use the video data first for a video.

After all that extra organizing time I was glad to get everything on the iPod. Y’know, the thing is great for watching my videos. Little moments in time captured and brought back. I think I like watching them on the iPod better than the computer screen. Part of it is that they seem more precious and intimate and part of it is the sound. With my nice pair of head phones I noticed the sound is pretty good on those little videos. It moves well as the people are moving. The sound doesn’t come across nearly as well on my desktop even with my nice computer speakers.

Organizational issues aside, and they are considerable, I think the iPod Touch is a great machine for viewing both photos and video. Plus it plays music too did you know? Once Apple gets the memory on them up to about 60 gigs I’ll really be thrilled.

I bought one of the new iPod Touches. The 16 gig model. I’ve been waiting for a device that I could use as a portable photo album and this is the first one that I thought could fit the bill. I’ve spent the last few years scanning, editing, and organizing all of my snap shots that were on film as well as my digital photos. I want to be able to find any picture in my archive at anytime. Even when I’m out. Sometimes an old picture can illustrate a point better than words but I’ve never been able to cary all my pictures with me. Now I can. Well, I still need some kind of carrying case for the iPod but that’s pretty minor. The thing is just too new for the dedicated cases to have come out yet.

Last month I finished the final edit of my photos so everything was ready to go. There were some bumps in the road though. iTunes is the software that’s made for working with the iPod and I’ve always thought it was pretty good. I’ve never had any real problems with it but all I ever used it for was to manage my music files. After all, that’s what it was programed to do. Now I have to manage photo and home movie files with it too. That makes things a little more complicated.

I already have all my photo files organized by date and event with the names of the people who appear in them as the file names. That was a lot of work but it allows me to easily search for someone or some place and is independent of any photo organization program. That was important to me because I don’t want my photo collection to be tied to any one program. No worries about updating a photo program or it becoming obsolete.

The Apple OS X operating system handles my organization method just fine and I’m sure Windows or Linux would too. It’s just named folders and files. Operating systems are made to organize that stuff. And with OS X the search function is really good and even displays thumbnails of the photos right in the search window. My system is fast and flexible and none of the photo viewing devises I’ve seen so far had the software to keep up with it. Every portable MP3 or video player is a photo viewer as an after thought. The iPod Touch isn’t so I went with it.

My first fear with the new iPod Touch was that I’d have to use iPhoto. I generally think Apple does a really good job with it’s software but I can’t stand iPhoto. It takes all my well organized folders and disorganizes them. It won’t even line them up by name (i.e date) as the OS does. I don’t want to have to reorganize everything. I shouldn’t have too either. But I didn’t have to use iPhoto because I found that iTunes will sync with my already organized folders. Hurrah, but with reservations.

iTunes and syncing. There’s another thing I can’t stand. That’s because every time you open the program it has to sync the things you indicate. That’s fine unless you want it to sync with thousands of things. That’s why I’ve always manually managed my music. It won’t let you manually manage photos. Ouch! So I start to sync my iPod with my photo collection, 4000 or so of them, and after a few minutes iTunes crashes. Then my G4 tower won’t recognize my new iPod. It won’t even reset it back to the factory settings. So I try my laptop. It recognizes the iPod and when I go to sync the photos it crashes iTunes. I rebot and the laptop still sees the iPod. Whew! I sync slowly a few folders at a time and all goes well. Except my desktop G4 tower still won’t recognize my new iPod Touch. Long story short it’s a bad USB2 port on the PCI card. Not Apple or the iPod’s fault and I need a new card. But that’s for another day because I had another free USB2 slot.

Once the pictures were on the iPod they were a joy to behold. I can hardly begin to describe how nice the iPod Touch is as a photo viewer. The screen is clear and crisp and the touch screen is a wonderful thing and really changes the way you look at pictures. You can pan, zoom, and change from vertical to horizontal effortlessly. When looking at a photo I’m constantly recomposing it and seeing new things in it. One picture becomes many pictures. It’s like having a built in “Ken Burn’s effect” for every picture in your collection. Worth the price of admission.

I wish the iPod had some sort of search function in conjunction with the photo viewer. I can’t actually search for anyone by name as I can on the computer and that would be helpful. But at least the photos all lined up perfectly in the folders named with the dates. That’s more than they do in iPhoto.

The video functionality on the iPod Touch is good too. But there were some pain in the ass organizational problems with the video. I’ll tell you about that next week. I’m a little too bleary eyed for it now.