I can't make any sense of what this new SoundExchange settlement actually means for DNA Lounge. Is someone going to come knocking on my door asking for an additional $25,000 per year because of our webcasts? Given that A) we are already paying ASCAP/SESAC/BMI for them, and B) the webcasts produce zero revenue. If you think you understand this crap, please explain it to me...

Dear Lazyweb,

With the new phone, I find myself in need of new headphones. My last three phones, two Treos and a Centro, used 2.5mm 4-band jacks. The Pre uses a far more sensible 3.5mm 4-band jack, but that means my headphones no longer fit. I don't want to use an adapter because they are bulky and, in my experience, make it more likely that you'll break the headphone jack.

My previous headphones were "Shure e2c", and I loved them. The sound quality was great, they fit well, and they blocked out outside noise better than any other headphone of the size that I've ever used. The cables tended to fray, though. I had the 2.5mm 4-band version, but they also used to make them in a 3.5mm 4-band version. However, apparently the whole e2c line has since been discontinued.

Shure's new product line baffles me. I can't tell what corresponding new product is, if there even is one. It kind of looks like they have decided to only make headphones with 3-band jacks, and if you want to use it as a headset on a cell phone, you have to use an adapter. That sounds bulky and irritating (and also would put the mic quite far away from your face, I assume.)

Before the e2c, I tried "Etymotic ER-6", but I hated them. I gave them away after two days. They had no bass response at all, and were not nearly as sound-isolating as the e2c were. And I they had the wrong sized jack, too.

So, because Shure's site confused me, I took someone's recommendation and picked up the "V-Moda Vibe Duo" headphones (3.5mm, 4-band). I've been using them for a week, and I kind of hate them. They block out basically no outside sound. They sound muddy. The midrange is weird. And about a quarter of the time when I take them out of my ears, the rubber ear-bud tips stay behind in my ear canal and I have to go digging, even using the smallest size.

My requirements are:

1. 3.5mm 4-band, so I can talk on the phone with it too (though the primary use is music).

2. In-ear-canal. Not those iPhone-like buds that just sit on the surface. Not over-the-ear cans. Don't bother telling me about those, no matter how much you love them.

3. Extremely sound-isolating. With the e2c, wearing the headphones without anything playing sounded like wearing earplugs. I loved that.

4. Good sound quality. I'm no audiophile, but I can tell when it's crap. Bass is better than "perfectly flat", but bass to the exclusion of all else is bad.

So what should I get?

Update: I picked up the Ultimate Ears SuperFi 4vi. Conveniently, the Apple store stocks these. I've only used them for a few minutes so far, but they seem pretty good. Nice isolation, and sound quality is very similar to (possibly better than) the e2c. So I'm hopeful.

One nice thing about the Modas was that the cable was cloth, so they didn't tangle as easily. More manufacturers should do that.

Dear Lazyweb,

Do any of you know a clue-enabled individual within the Facebook hivemind who would be willing to talk to me, and allow me to browbeat them into fixing a bug / design flaw?

DNA Lounge has a so-called "page" on Facebook. We post our events there. However, there is apparently no way for us to send event invitations to everyone who has friended ("fanned") DNA Lounge.

If this DNA Lounge "page" were a "group" instead, I could send event invitations to everyone who had friended ("joined") the group. But clearly "pages" are intended for businesses: they have build-in fields like address and hours of operation. "Groups" don't.

baconmonkey has a hunch that "pages" are a legacy thing: something that Facebook thought was a good idea once and have since abandoned. I'm not sure why he thinks that, since they still seem to be pushing them as the thing that businesses should use.

Maybe we should just delete our "page" and create a "group" instead. I don't know. I can't tell.

What I would like is for someone who actually works for Facebook to tell me their understanding of how a business like mine should use their service.

I want them to either fix this bug (the bug that you can't send event invitations to "fans" of your "page") or tell me the right way to promote my events to these people who have explicitly expressed their interest.

I'm asking here because Facebook apparently has no tech support and no way to contact them that is more direct than spitting down the gaping well of a web forum that no employee ever reads.

I wrote a restaurant tip calculator, since there wasn't one.

It was relatively painless, though the documentation is pretty spotty.

Since Palm isn't yet letting people upload things to the App Catalog, here's how you install this:

1. Email yourself a link to the .ipk file. Don't mail the file itself as an attachment: just send yourself an email with the URL in it. You can do that by clicking here.

2. Open that mail message on your Pre, and click the link.

3. That will appear to have done nothing, but it did! Go to the first page of the Launcher, and you'll see that the new application has been installed.

Dear Lazyweb, I have several questions.

1. How do I get it into the Palm App Catalog?

2. How do I give a button a different background color, while still having it look like a standard Pre button?

3. Native code, man. I need it. How do I do it? I seriously doubt I can do a port of Dali Clock using only Javascript and the <canvas> tag.

Update: Oh, the email I've been getting. Look, it only does whole numbers because if you insist that your tip be accurate to the penny you are a cheapskate weirdo. Here in the Colonies, we use paper money, not coins. If your bill is $44.22, just enter $45. Don't go all Scrooge McAsperger's on us, ok?

Update 2: Holy shit! The intardwebs have a new cesspool, I see!

I figured out why my Pre couldn't send mail. The phone is sending this:

ehlo www.palm.com
STARTTLS
AUTH LOGIN

And Postfix 2.4.5 is replying: Error: send HELO/EHLO first

The problem there is that EHLO should have been upper case it's not sending another EHLO after STARTTLS. Turning off smtpd_helo_required is a workaround.

My question, dear Lazyweb:

Where's the Palm Pre WebOS Bugzilla? How do I report this bug in such a way that it will actually reach a developer who can say, "Oh, duh" and actually check in a fix?

If there is not a public bug reporting mechanism, then next best would be for someone to point me at your friend who works there who is willing to take mailed reports from me directly...

I finally got a Pre. It seems pretty sweet so far. (And the keyboard is great. Anyone you've heard complaining about it is crazy.) However, there are some things I have yet to figure out. That's where you come in, dear Lazyweb...

1. I got incoming mail working (POP3 SSL, self-signed) but I can't get outgoing (SMTP TLS, PLAIN AUTH, self-signed) to work. Mostly the only error message I get is a red exclamation mark. Yesterday it was occasionally saying that I had the wrong password, which isn't true, but I can't tell how to get the Pre to show me, like, a debug log or anything.
   Update: Fixed: Turn off smtpd_helo_required.

2. I have only a single mail server, but I have several email addresses. How do I select what to put in the "From" field of particular outgoing messages?

3. Where is the "mark all messages read" command? Where is the "delete all messages" command?

4. It does Google Chat, which means it speaks Jabber. How do I tell it to use Livejournal as my Jabber server instead of Google?

5. Is there a way to set a different ring tone for text messages?

6. I wish to have an archive of my phone's IM / SMS logs on my desktop computer. How?

7. I wish to have an archive of my "Notes" on my desktop computer. How? And absent that, what happens if I lose my phone? Do all my Notes vanish? Because the docs seem to say that this mysterious "backup" business that it does to palm.com is for application settings only, not data.

8. Maybe I missed it amongst the whopping three games in the app catalog, but where's Bubbels?

9. I gather there is not yet an (outgoing) ssh application?

Things I have discovered:

10. To make self-signed certs work, first you have to copy the certificate file to the Pre (drag it out of Keychain Access onto the Pre mounted as a drive) and then run Device Info and select Certificate Manager from the menu to import and trust it. The error message for "you didn't jump through hoops to authorize a self-signed cert" is "SSL error, check the date and time."

11. As I said above, "Notes" on the device are apparently not synched anywhere accessible, and aren't visible on the file system. This led to the question of "how do I get my old notes into the phone?" Copy and paste only work with text fields, not the contents of mail messages or web pages. The only way I could think of to move my existing notes onto the device was to put them in dummy events in my calendar, then cut-and-paste from those calendar text fields to the Notes app. WTF.

12. There's no way to delete all those built-in apps that you don't care about, like "NASCAR". But you can drag them to the very last page of the app list so that you never have to see them.

13. The web browser doesn't scroll to #anchors on URLs. WTF. Though for this to be the first "WTF" I found about the web browser is kind of amazing.

GOD DAMNED PIECE OF SHIT MISSING SYNC AAAAAUGH.

14. If you don't use Google Mail and Google Calendar, you need Missing Sync. That seems to be the only way to sync your Mac's contacts and calendar to a Pre without entrusting all of your data to Skynet.

15. Missing Sync apparently syncs all of your calendars, even if you've told it only to select some of them. This means you probably want to unsubscribe from the gigantic SonicLiving iCal feed right now. It also ignores the "don't sync old events" option, and syncs absolutely everything back to the dawn of time.

16. Missing Sync doesn't sync contact photos. Instead, it takes all your contact photos from Address Book and puts them in a photo gallery called "Contact Photos". That's, uh, useful.

17. Missing Sync uses wifi to sync contacts and calendars, but requires the phone to be put in USB-drive mode to sync music and photos. THE DUMB, IT BURNS.

18. Missing Sync is still flaky as hell. In fact, I might fairly categorize it as "only hints at the possiblity of barely fucking working at all". It may cause me to give up on my thus-far-complete unwillingness to create a Google account. But I sure hope not.

    For example, every now and then it chooses to take a subscribed calendar feed in iCal, copy it to the phone, and then copy it back to iCal as a regular calendar. And then the next time around, Missing Sync freaks out because now there are two calendars in iCal with the same name.

Dear Lazyweb, how do I get rid of the "new tab" plus-box on the title bar of Safari 4? I never use tabs and it's in the way. This thing:

Answer: defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

No, I'm not interested in discussing the merits of tabs with you. At all. Shut up.

Dear Lazyweb,

Is there some kind of face-recognition plugin for Lightroom? Failing that, some software that will make it easy for me to auto-tag the people in my photos into their EXIF data, which I can then re-import into Lightroom?

Importing everything into iPhoto is not an option, since it copies and/or renames everything, and doesn't write data back to the original files. (Also iPhoto is generally crap.)

I tried "ilovephotos" and it's useless. It does an ok job of spotting faces, but makes no attempt to learn who's face is whose.

Are there any options that don't suck?

Options that involve "upload all your photos" or that do not provide any way to put the data into EXIF tags will not be considered.

Dear Lazyweb,

What's your preferred source for t-shirt printing?

Our current supplier costs us $10 for a single color on black, 10 business days turnaround. The printing is good, and the shirts are high quality, but that still sounds expensive to me. Are there better options?

(Please don't suggest "Cafe Press" or "stencil them yourself".)

Dear Lazyweb,

My beloved Kinesis Evolution keyboard seems to have completely died.

It is many-years discontinued, and not available on eBay. Kinesis has no back stock, or parts.

Please help me find one of these keyboards. Or, you know, five.

My wrists thank you in advance.

Dear Lazyweb,

How the hell do I get SpamAssassin to work properly with Postfix? I've been through this several times before, but as far as I can tell, it's never worked right. Here is what I want:

• Postfix feeds all locally-delivered mail through SpamAssassin;
• Each recipient user on the system can have a .spamassassin/user_prefs file that uses directives like "required_score" and "blacklist_from" and "score". (Note that I said that I want this to be per user, not global. His blacklist is not her blacklist.)

Sounds simple, right? Sounds like the setup everyone in the world must have, right?

I can't get it to ever read the user_prefs files. And my mail log is full of errors about not being able to write lock files in ~user/.spamassassin/.

( What I've tried... --More--(31%)  )

So, I have this "Save DNA Lounge" Facebook group. Dear Lazyweb, please tell me how to use it properly.

I wanted to send out an update to the people who joined the group about recent press (basically the same thing I just published in my DNA blog.)

I used "Message All Members" to do this.

Apparently what that does is, makes something show up in everybody's facebook "Inbox". But it doesn't show anything in their news feed, and it doesn't send them email about it. I think.

I guess my other options would have been to just post a "link" to the group (would that have shown up in the news feed? Who can tell?) or to edit some text into the "Recent News" field. (That appears also to not show up in the feed. I think.)

Is "Message All Members" the done thing? Or should I have done something else?

It's also infuriating that I can't type HTML anywhere on Facebook.

And that there is no place on the profile of the main DNA Lounge Facebook page to link to the "Save DNA Lounge" group, or even to include a sentence about what the hell DNA Lounge is.

"Facebook: At Least It's Not Myspace."™

Dear Lazyweb,

How do you load an NSImage with proper EXIF rotation applied? I can't figure out how to determine the correct rotation. The following doesn't work. I get a dictionary containing a bunch of EXIF keys like exposure and shutter speed, but the "Orientation" tag is notably missing, and the image is displayed sideways. Preview and Finder display it properly, and exiftool says the field is there.

  NSImage *img = [[NSImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:filename];
  NSArray *reps = [img representations];
  NSBitmapImageRep *rep = reps ? [reps objectAtIndex:0] : 0;
  if (rep) {
    NSDictionary *exif = [rep valueForProperty: @"NSImageEXIFData"];
    if (exif) {
      NSString *rot = [exif objectForKey:@"Orientation"];
      NSLog (@"rot = %@", rot);
      NSEnumerator *e = [exif keyEnumerator];
      id key;
      while ((key = [e nextObject])) {
        NSLog (@"%@ = %@", key, [exif objectForKey:key]);
      }
    }
  }

Let's say you have an RSS feed and some consumers of it would prefer full entries of text/html content, but some would prefer full entries of text/plain content. Is the thing to do to put the text/plain in <description> and the text/html in <content:encoded>? Or will that cause some consumers to "accidentally" display the text/plain when they should be displaying the text/html?

Or should the two fields be <content> and <content:encoded> instead? (Does <content> even exist?) All the documentation says <description> should be an abbreviated summary, but I see nothing that talks about how to achieve that which MIME calls multipart/alternative.

(Just trusting the text/plain consumers to strip the tags out of the HTML to display it is suboptimal; the two versions should be formatted slightly differently to be most readable.)

Update: Ok, I changed the feed to contain both text/plain and text/html versions. Please try that in your favorite feed reader, and let me know if it screws up. A screw-up would be: it's showing you plain text when it could be showing you HTML.

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.

(Only slightly surprisingly, iTunes doesn't use the RVA2 ID3 tag used by normalize, but instead uses a COMM/iTunNORM tag.)

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.

Dear Lazyweb,

Youtube is now serving up HD videos with fmt=22. (Previously, the equally undocumented fmt=18 gave you slightly-higher-quality MP4.) But has anyone figured out what to throw at the /get_video URL to actually download either the MP4 or HD versions? All the things I've tried still result in it serving up the low-res version.

Update: The trick is to use th t and fmt parameters only; provide others and it redirects you back to the flv version. My youtubedown script works more better now. It will grab the HD version if available, else the MP4.

Also, has anyone figured out how to download video from mtvmusic.com? The video quality is pretty crappy, and (contrary to their claims) it is far from being their entire catalog, but sometimes I'll take what I can get.

Dear Lazyweb,

I have finally decided what velvet painting to commission. But first I need to come up with an image for them to work from, and that's where I need your help.

I want a picture of Giger's Alien, but I want him wearing a top-hat and monocle. Possibly sitting in an overstuffed chair.

I seek the assitance of the lazyweb in finding a good source image of the alien onto which these other items can be easily photoshopped. I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to google up a picture of an alien with its head at a usable angle.

Dear Lazyweb, I'm trying to get the postfix, dovecot, and spamd logs out of /var/log/system.log and into their own files on MacOS 10.5.5. (  --More--(13%)  )

Update: The answer is, "redirect spamd's stderr to /dev/null or launchd will log it a second time." Apparently spamd spams stderr with all its logs as well as whatever the -s option says.

I can't figure out how the hell you report a bug to Youtube, other than by posting in an obviously-ignored honeypot forum, so I guess I'll just post my bug report here and hope that my LJ is read by a Youtube developer or someone who knows a Youtube developer. (This trick has worked before...)

Dear Youtube,

It used to be that I could press play on the video player and then immediately press pause, to allow the whole video to silently buffer. That no longer works. Now I have to wait until enough of the video has been downloaded that it actually starts playing before I can pause it. This is very irritating, because it means that I can't just press play+pause and then hide the window to come back to it later: I have to sit there and wait 10+ seconds for it to start squawking at me first, then drag the slider to the left, then press pause. Lame! I should be able to press the pause button even if zero bytes of the video have been downloaded.

A few hundred dollars later, my ongoing attempt to have my second monitor cloned onto my video projector is still made of fail. What am I doing wrong here?

My plan was this:

2008 iMac mini-DVI-D output
→ Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
→ DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
1→ DVI LCD monitor (1600×1200).
2→ 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
→ HDMI-to-component converter
→ HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
→ Projector (component input).

My plan fails in two ways:

1. If I just do this:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → DVI-D-male-to-2x-DVI-D-female splitter
   1→ DVI monitor.
   2→ (second output of splittter unconnected)

   then the monitor just sits there and flickers, trying to display a message about input being out of range. So clearly that splitter confuses the hell out of either the Mac or the monitor. I don't know which.

2. And if I just do the second part:
   iMac
   → Mini-DVI-D-to-DVI-D-female
   → 30' DVI-D-male-to-HDMI cable
   → HDMI-to-component converter
   → HD15M-to-3xRCA cable
   → Projector.

   I again get no signal on the projector. Sometimes I saw the projector displaying snow-crash; sometimes it appeared to be trying to lock on to various resolutions that were changing every 5 seconds; briefly, I saw something that appeared to contain the right colors in the static; and now it's decided to just always be black. Anyway, no worky. I tried all permutations of the various switches on the device, and all permutations of the 3 RCA cables.

Suggestions?