I think I've almost managed to get the DNA Lounge popup webcast window to resize the video when you resize the window. (Unsurprisingly, the only way that worked portably was to use tables.) Does it work for you? This seems to resize properly in both Firefox and Safari. It mostly works in Opera: it resizes properly, but there's a scrollbar and the bottom text is off the bottom of the screen. I'm not sure how to fix that.

What does it do in IE? Does the video resize, and is there a green box around it?

Previously.

Dear Lazyweb,

When you go to the DNA Lounge Webcasts page and click on the "Video Webcast" link, it pops up a chromeless window with the Justin.TV Flash embed in it.

I'd like to make it so that when you resize that window, the embed resizes with it.

This is what I tried. It works great in Safari, but in Firefox, the embed is always 100% wide and 1 pixel tall; and in Opera, it's always 100% wide but about 200 pixels tall.

Ideas?

Dear Lazyweb,

I shoot with a Canon EOS 5D and an f1.4 50mm lens. This combo takes great photos in the dark, but the auto-focus sucks.

One solution it to put a flash on it and set it to "emit, no fire" so that the flash uses a red light for focus assist, but doesn't actually flash. I don't like this solution because the flash doubles the size of the thing I'm lugging around, and I bang it into things all the time.

Another solution is the Canon Speedlite Transmitter ST-E2, which is basically a flash without the flash part: it does focus assist and does it well (it also does other things that I don't care about).

Here's the problem: unlike a real flash, it doesn't run on AA batteries. It runs on these shitty 6v "2CR5" batteries, the disposable version of which are around $5 each. They don't last very long, maybe 1500 or 2000 shots.

I've bought rechargable 2CR5 battery kits from two different manufacturers, and guess what, they don't work. More specifically, they seem to not fit. I can only get the ST-E2 to function with them if I keep the lid open and manually jiggle the battery. They're not making contact somehow. I've tried the obvious things, including taping shims around them, to no avail. Maybe my ST-E2 is defective, but since it always works fine with the disposable batteries, that seems unlikely.

What I'd like is something that plugs into the hot-shoe and does focus-assist, but that runs on AA batteries. Failing that, a rechargable 2CR5 that actually works with the ST-E2. Any suggestions?

Shower fail continues. Bah.

Dear Lazyweb, I am having an issue with a series of tubes.

I have crappy water pressure in my shower. However, the sinks in my bathroom and kitchen have no such problem. The sinks have the fury of a geyser, compared to the anemic mist the shower puts out. My high-tech measuring methodology is this: in any of my sinks, I can fill up a pint glass in about 1.7 seconds, with either hot or cold water. However, if I use either the bathtub faucet or the shower (with the shower head removed, so it's just a bare pipe) this takes about 8.2 seconds.

So the water is there, it just ain't making it to the shower. The sink looks like this, and the valve in the shower looks like this:

They appear to both be fed by the same 1/2" flex-tubing. The two screw-valves on either side of the shower valve assembly are turned all the way up.

I had a plumber come out and he said that he could replace the shower valve assembly (which would require turning off the water to the whole building, knocking out the wall, and re-tiling), but that it likely wouldn't make any difference, so I should just live with it. He seems to suspect that all such valves are standardized at a "crappy water pressure" setting, and replacing it would leave me exactly where I am now.

I can't see any markings on the thing in the wall that would let me research what its flow is actually rated to be, so that I could compare it with potential replacements.

Any thoughts?

Update: I took out the flow regulator that was hiding behind the big screw thingy that is 2nd from the right in the right picture above (it's the smaller part pictured to the right, here), and now I get 1.7 second flow from both the tub faucet and the showerhead pipe! Unfortunately my shower head still retards that down to around 4 seconds, so it's time to find a better one of those...

Update 2: I spoke too soon. It seems that taking out the flow regulator increased the flow of cold water but not of hot water, so after taking that out the shower was slightly-warm at best, never hot. So apparently I get to choose between good water pressure and hot water.

The hot water valve on the left doesn't open as far as the cold water valve on the right does (one turn versus two), so maybe that's the problem. But replacing that would definitely require opening up the wall and de-soldering the pipes.

The last time I asked this I didn't get any practical answers, but that was a year ago, so I might as well ask again:

Dear Lazyweb,

How do I normalize the audio volume of a bunch of MOV and MP4 files?

The "Sound Check" option in iTunes works passably well for MP3 files, but doesn't do anything for videos. This makes it annoying to use a playlist full of music videos as a source of ambient entertainment, since the volume fluctuates wildly.

I think that a solution involving manually pulling the audio out of the movie files, normalizing it as a WAV, and re-inserting it into the movie is probably doomed to synchronization errors. So let's not.

I have tried using the "Get Info / Options / Volume Adjustment" slider manually on a few videos, but that is far too manual and annoying to do for all of them. Perhaps an approach would be to compute the volume boost desired of each movie, then set whatever ID3 tag corresponds to that slider? Or failing that, do it with Applescript?

Update: I kinda got something working with Applescript here. It fails if any video requires a volume increase of more than 100% (~6dB), but I only have a few videos of which that is true.

Dear Lazyweb, what's the sensible way to synchronize photos between my iPhone and Mac, given that I do not have iPhoto installed? I'm hoping to have a directory, say, ~/Pictures/Phone/, which is bidirectionally mirrored: photos I take on the phone show up there. Photos I place there show up on the phone. Photos I delete from there are deleted from the phone.

If I just let Lightroom launch when the phone is attached, it always pops up the import dialog even if there are only already-imported photos on the phone, which is annoying.

Ok, "BeejiveIM" is worthless, because it seems incapable of keeping itself logged in and/or reconnecting. (Also annoying is that it doesn't identify itself to the AIM server as a "mobile" connection, so every time it reconnects I get the unblockable "you are logged in two places" message.)

So that was a waste of ten bucks. Please recommend other iPhone AIM clients that actually work. Plus points if they do Jabber too, but actually staying connected is more important.

It turns out that this is, so far, the only thing I miss about the Palm Pre software: their integration of AIM and SMS into a single app actually worked well.

Dear Lazyweb,

This is the part where you tell me about cool iPhone apps that I would like. Go.

I already have: OpenTable, Taxi Magic, Now Playing, Apple Remote, Shazam, Facebook, Google Earth, Photoshop Mobile, Katamari Lite, Sol Free, Twitterific, Wikipanion, and AIM.

Other questions:

• Is the official AOL AIM app the one to use? Isn't there something that integrates SMS and AIM into one app? And that also speaks Jabber? It's weird that Apple's bundled messaging app doesn't do this.
• What's the closest thing to Bubbels?
• What's the best Tetris?
• What's the easiest way to convert MP3 snippets to ringtones?
• Can I make it stop asking me to confirm every time an app wants to know my location, and just always assume "yes"?
• Does the mail reader really have no "mark all read" or "delete all" commands?

Since Livejournal's ability to keep their various services actually running has gotten so much worse this year, I've started divesting myself of reliance on them. Last month, LJ went a full five days without updating RSS feeds, so now I no longer use LJ as my feed aggregator (I'm using NetNewsWire now; it's ok). And last week, LJ was totally down for 4+ hours, meaning that I couldn't use my LJ OpenID token to log in to other sites, so now I'm running my own OpenID provider too (phpMyID, it's really easy).

My question is, what do I use to replace LJ's Jabber server? (Other than Google Chat, obviously.) I'd like my Jabber ID to be "jwz@jwz.org" instead of "jwz@livejournal.com", and I suspect the only way to accomplish that is to run my own Jabber server. Said server would only ever have one person connected to it and would peer with the rest of the network. I tried installing Djabberd, but there is basically nothing in the way of documentation or examples, so I couldn't get it to do anything.

(I imagine the lack of reliability that seems to be Livejournal's new way of doing things -- plus the fact that the site feels like a ghost town now -- will eventually cause me to move this blog to somewhere else. I'm not sure where, though. All the options are bad. Run it on your own site: get no comments but lots of spam. Just use Facebook: effectively limited to friends-only posts. Bleh.)

Dear Lazyweb (and brad),

How do I get an RSS feed of my LJ friends that includes friends-only posts?

This method does not include friends-only posts, even when you add &checkcookies=1. The &filter parameter doesn't appear to do anything, either.

There doesn't appear to be any way in the LJ protocol to do this either. I'm about to resort to screen-scraping the HTML.

Dear Lazyweb, what should I use to read RSS feeds?

Given that almost all of my friends have given up on using Livejournal for actual blogging, the only thing I really use it for these days (besides hosting my own posts) is as an RSS aggregator for the 200+ feeds I subscribe to.

Lately Livejournal seems utterly incapable of keeping their feed poller running. Last week, no feeds updated for more than 5 days, and now it's happening again: it's been more than 12 hours since any feed has updated.

I wish I could just use Mail.app as my feed reader, but it doesn't work for shit. It re-posts un-changed entries all the time.

I gather a lot of people use Google Reader, but for previously discussed reasons, I refuse to log in to any Google account. So forget that.

Are there any free OSX desktop apps for this that don't suck? Or other free web sites that don't suck?

Update: Almost everybody is recommending NetNewsWire. It seems ok so far. This may end up being the final nail in the coffin of LiveJournal for me.

Dear Lazyweb, any idea why I can't build the gd2 (bug 21098), ghostscript (bug 21111), or faac (bug 21112) MacPorts on 10.6? I get "This Perl not built to support threads" even after having cleaned and re-installed perl5, perl5.8 and perl5.10. Many other ports installed fine. I guess it's an "autoreconf" screw-up?

Dear Lazyweb,

Any opinions on whether justin.tv or ustream.tv has the higher quality video? Or is that a stupid question, since they both use the video broadcasting stuff built into the Flash plugin and are therefore identical?

I'm currently using justin.tv for the DNA webcasts, but I was wondering whether ustream.tv would result in marginally-less-crappy quality.

(I have heard rumors of Windows-only software that results in higher quality Flash video streaming. Obviously this is of no use to me. It has to be MacOS 10.5, Intel, and no, I'm not running Windows on my Mac.)

Dear Lazyweb,

Now that the nagware "USB Overdrive" driver has stopped working on 10.6, I guess it's time to ask again: is there some simple, free way to cause my middle mouse button to send Option+Left Click instead of Middle Click? (Logitech RX1000.)

Update: It turns out that USB Overdrive does still work on 10.6, it's just that the behavior changed slightly. I also use the Apple pref that swaps Opt and Cmd, and now that means that I have to tell USB Overdrive that middle-button sends Cmd+Left instead of Opt+Left. I didn't have to do that in 10.5, so I guess the order in which these things fire changed. Or something.

Anyway, I still find it absurd that I'm expected to pay extra just to remap my mouse buttons, because the OS doesn't include this basic functionality, and there's no free software to do it. It makes it feel like this OS is nickel-and-diming me over trivia.

XScreenSaver 5.09 is out now! In addition to the appearance of a few new savers, this version works on Snow Leopard (as well as 10.4).

It has a few bugs, but since the previous version didn't run at all on 10.6, I'll call this the "better than nothing" release.

Some things I could use help with:

1. There were some new color-endian issues with 10.6. I have tested it on a 10.5.8 PPC Mac and on a 10.6 Intel Mac. I would like to know if images are displaying properly (in, for example, the Ripples screen saver, when loading photos from disk) on 1) 10.4 Intel Macs, 2) 10.4 PPC Macs, and 3) 10.5 Intel Macs.

2. Somehow the colors got screwed up in xmatrix on both 10.6 Intel and 10.5 PPC. It makes no sense to me that the colors are screwed up there but nowhere else. I'm lost in a twisty maze of endiannesses, all alike.   Update: I've fixed this, it will be in the next release.

3. When running the savers under SaverTester or System Preferences on 10.6 (but not 10.5), I get frequent crashes at startup inside NSLayoutManager, as I mentioned earlier. I assume it is a memory corruption bug somewhere, but I can't find it.

4. Someone needs to fix the configure.in file for autoconf 2.64. I can't make any sense of this bullshit change they've made: Expanded-Before-Required.html. I have no stomach for this, so until someone sends me a patch, I guess xscreensaver will require autoconf 2.63 or earlier.

5. osxgrabscreen.m is using "deprecated functions" like CGDisplayAddressForPosition(), and that code was flaky to begin with. If someone would like to write me some "modern", non-deprecated code that grabs an image of the desktop and returns it as an array of RGB data, I would be most appreciative. This, apparently, is rocket science.   Update: Fixed this too, though the fix is 10.5-specific, so it will remain flaky on 10.4.

6. Something has gone catastropically wrong with makedepend on 10.6. It takes like 15 minutes to process even a single one of the xscreensaver Makefiles. It's crazy. This is not an xscreensaver problem per se, but if you know a fix, I'd like to hear it.

Let me know how it works!

I'm working on getting xscreensaver running on 10.6, and roughly 2/3rds of the time any of the savers launch, they crash here:

Program received signal: "EXC_BAD_ACCESS".
#0 0x00007fff825df445 in +[NSLayoutManager(NSPrivate) _doSomeBackgroundLayout] ()
#1 0x00007fff825df23f in _NSPostBackgroundLayout ()
#2 0x00007fff84cfe437 in __CFRunLoopDoObservers ()
#3 0x00007fff84cda6e4 in __CFRunLoopRun ()
#4 0x00007fff84cda03f in CFRunLoopRunSpecific ()
#5 0x00007fff86e50c4e in RunCurrentEventLoopInMode ()
#6 0x00007fff86e50a53 in ReceiveNextEventCommon ()
#7 0x00007fff86e5090c in BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode ()
#8 0x00007fff824a5570 in _DPSNextEvent ()
#9 0x00007fff824a4ed9 in -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] ()
#10 0x00007fff8246ab29 in -[NSApplication run] ()
#11 0x00007fff82463844 in NSApplicationMain ()
#12 0x000000010000342c in main (argc=1, argv=0x7fff5fbff380) at /Users/jwz/src/xscreensaver/OSX/main.m:16

I'm not even using NSLayoutManager (as far as I know), so presumably this is some random memory corruption that happened somewhere else entirely, but turning on the MallocCheckHeap and related environment variables doesn't reveal anything. Any ideas how to debug this?

None of the XCode "Performance Tools" seem even remotely useful for tracking down memory corruption, but maybe I just don't understand them. Anyway, I thought the garbage collector was supposed to make everything sweetness and light?

Before I dive in to getting xscreensaver to work on 10.6, I started smaller, and got the Dali Clock screen saver to work. Version 2.30 is out now. Please try it.

Unfortunately, I think the screen saver executable in there only works on 10.6, and the app and widget no longer work on 10.4, and I can't figure out how to fix that.

That's where you come in, dear Lazyweb.

To make it build on 10.6, I had to make these changes in XCode:

• Architectures: Standard (32/64-bit Universal)
• Base SDK: Mac OS X 10.5 (10.6 for the .saver)
• C/C++ Compiler Version: GCC 4.0 (not 4.2)
• Objective-C Garbage Collection: Supported
• Info.plist: change "LSMinimumSystemVersion" from "10.4.0" to "10.4".

But it's obviously unacceptable that this should be a 10.6-only binary.

1. How to I build DaliClock.app in such a way that it is runnable on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 systems?

   When I set the Base SDK to 10.4, I get "warning: Mac OS X version 10.5 or later is needed for use of the new objc abi", followed by "#error 64-bit not supported" from from objc/objc.h, included via Foundation.h.

   I suspect this means that you can't build a 10.4 version of the x86_64 binary, which is fine. Since 10.4 was perfectly happy running the i386 or ppc binaries, it's ok if the x86_64 build be 10.6-only, and the i386 and ppc builds be 10.4. But I don't see a way to specify that.

2. How to I build DaliClock.saver in such a way that it is runnable on even 10.5 systems?

   When I set the Base SDK to 10.5, I get "ld: warning: in MacOSX10.5.sdk ScreenSaver.framework, missing required architecture x86_64 in file".

   Maybe this is the same kind of problem. But it's worse, because it means I can't build a 10.5-compatible version of the saver at all.

3. How do I make these warnings go away?

   "AppController.m warning: passing argument 3 of 'addObserver:forKeyPath:options:context:' makes integer from pointer without a cast"

   The code in question is this, which had been warning-free before:

   [userDefaultsController addObserver:self
             forKeyPath:@"values.windowTitlebarIsHidden"
             options:nil
             context:@selector(windowTitlebarIsHiddenDidChange:)];

So, my Tivo started freaking out, and in a weird way. Playback of already-recorded stuff was fine, but new recordings and live TV were stuttery (going black for 1 second every 6), and sometimes it would seem to momentarily forget that the crypto card was plugged in. Since this sounded a little more like a hardware problem than a bad drive, I took a chance and bought a new (used) DirecTivo of the same hardware vintage off eBay (it was only $60 including shipping, so what the hell). But, when I moved my old drive into the new box, it didn't boot. Just sits there at the "Tivo is powering up" screen forever.

Which leaves me with some options.

1. Use the drive from the new tivo. This will probably work, but the downsides are: A) I lose all the old recordings I have not yet watched, B) it's a smaller drive, C) it doesn't have any of the hacks installed like the web server or the ability to talk to ethernet instead of a phone line.

2. Get a new drive and re-hack the new tivo from scratch. Downsides: A) lose my old recordings, B) Doing this is hellaciously complicated. It took two of us days to figure it out last time. I'm really not looking forward to doing that again. Is there some dead-simple way to do this that involves only using a Mac, and does not involve lugging home and tearing apart some random PC, and does not involve digging through a dozen years-old, wrong, un-cross-referenced pages on that despicable "Deal Database" site?

3. Cancel my DirecTV subscription and just torrent everything from now on. Downside: it's not very automatic. I liked being able to just give Tivo a list of program names and have the new, unwatched episodes just show up with no manual intervention or record-keeping on my part.

What are your recommendations here, oh Lazyweb?

Update: For the record, to move a drive from one Tivo to another of the same hardware vintage, you have to: A) pay DirecTV $20 for a new access card (you can't move them) and then B) run the 51killer.tcl script to tell the Tivo app that it's ok that the crypto key has changed (without this, it will give an error #51 every time it wants to record a program, even though crypto is turned off.)

Dear Lazyweb,

I have a Mac, and I have a Pre, and I would like my Mac's address book and calendar to be bidirectionally synchronized with my phone.

You'd think this would be a no-brainer.

Palm's recommended solution to this is, "Give up on using desktop applications, and use Google Mail and Google Calendar instead". The Pre can sync to those.

Another solution is Missing Sync, which I had been using with my Palm Treos and Centro since 2005 or so.

However, I've been using Missing Sync for Pre since the phone was released, and it is a categorical piece of shit. I have yet to get it to sync twice in a row without error. There have been three betas, and I reported extensive debug logs to them in each beta, with no response. I finally got a response after I complained to 'sales' instead of 'support', and then two days later, the trial period expired. So now I can't even go through the motions of trying out their obviously-unlikely-to-work boilerplate response that comes down to, "your call is very important to us, delete all your contacts and calendars, reboot, and try again".

I mailed them saying, "I'd like to try your suggestion, but you ignored me for so long that now it has expired. How do I reset the timer?" They replied, "You can't. Pay us money, and if we can't fix the problem, you can ask for a refund."

Well, I think "fuck that" is the only possible response.

I spent a while trying to figure out how to reset the timer and failed. Deleting /Library/Preferences/.MSWebOSInstall makes the Missing Sync installer willing to run again, but there's some other file somewhere that the app itself is consulting, because it still knows.

I would prefer not to give my contacts and calendars to Google, because I don't trust them.

(I don't care if you trust them. I don't care if you think that's stupid. I'm not interested in discussing that with you. At all.)

Do I have any other options? I see that Pre can sync with Exchange. Is there an Exchange clone I can run on my Mac that will bridge between the Pre and iCal/AddressBook?

Failing that, and assuming that I do knuckle under to Skynet and allow Google to have all of my contacts and calendars, is it possible to bidirectionally sync contacts and calendars and between my Mac desktop and the Google hivemind without actually using Gmail for email at all? That is, using it just as a data store for my address book?