Troubleshooting

Are you having connection issues with your Mac?

Relationships can be hard work, but Cupertino provides built-in Dear Abby services when your network and Mac won't play nicely.

The Mac OS X Network Diagnostics and Mail Connection Doctor can offer you great tools to to troubleshoot network issues.

If you're having trouble surfing, open your Network System Preferences and click "Assist Me" (Apple -> System Preferences -> Network -> Assist Me). You'll be asked whether you'd like help setting up a new network connection ("Assistant...") or troubleshoot a problem with your current connection ("Diagnostics..."). Network Assistant or Diagnostic will guide you through the troubleshooting steps any decent live Help Desk or Tech Support would work through with you on the phone, without the 40-minute wait on hold.

Likewise, if you're having trouble downloading or sending mail, there's a built-in Mail Connection Doctor in Apple's Mail program (open Mail, then Window -> Connection Doctor). It will tell you which SMTP servers are working (for sending your mail) and which E-mail accounts are connecting properly and which aren't for downloading.

If there are problems, Mail Connection Doctor will offer suggestions, and double-clicking on the message will bring you directly to your Mail Preferences so that you can easily try different configurations until you're up and running.

In addition, if you're having trouble with your wireless network, AirPort Utility (Applications -> Utilities -> AirPort Utility) can also guide you through problem-solving.

Listen to your Mac (it's always about communication, isn't it?), et voilà, no more relationship troubles.

Before iTunes 8 and the "Genius" feature, there were a few, and just a few, options for Mac users wanting to automatically generate Smart Playlists built on complex characteristics like BPM ("Beats Per Minute"), Intensity, and the more esoteric personal "style". Pandora, a great service no longer available in Canada thanks to the moronic music industry hacks whose main strategy to save their corporations is to antagonize and alienate customers and make the product, music, inaccessible and inconvenient... was one online option. It used the "Music Genome Project" algorithm that actually involved humans rating music. The human touch is still the most accurate.

Another option was Tangerine by Potion Factory. The advantage of this application was its iTunes integration, though BPM accuracy is in the range only about 70% of the time. Download the application, drag it into your Applications folder, launch it, and without further adieu it starts analyzing your iTunes library. It will cost you $25 to export the results into your iTunes library.

Given the number of songs...

(All of them paid for... in one way or another.)

you can expect your Mac to take some time on the calculations, however, even given the extent of a 50,000 strong library, Tangerine seemed to stall far too repeatedly.

To cut a painfully long story down to pithy, and painfully written, blog post: Tangerine is stymied by the DRM iTunes puts on non-iTunes Plus music.

The solution is to exclude Protected music from analysis. To do this, you could peruse Andy Kim's blog archives, of Potion Factory fame, for this brief entry and to read the hint "I suggest filtering out protected songs using the rules in Tangerine!'s preferences..." If you didn't find this advice, the solution is to go to Tangerine Prefs:

Click on "Rules", and then "Edit".

Add "Protected AAC Audio File" to the Default Rule.

Tangerine will then only analyze the remaining songs that are not excluded via the preference rules.

The long and the short is, once again, the music industry feels consumers will flock to buying music of lower quality and greater inconvenience than free, high-quality, convenient pirated material.

If the labels provided the BPM, and other detailed information, it might be able to make some pretense at providing value for the inconvenience of DRM. But they provide nothing.

Nope, if you're interested in automatic music playlists for classes, it's sad to say, but stick to torrented files.

Sigh.

If you have graduated to Aperture from iPhoto as your main photo management software, and like to share your photo library with other users thereby allowing other users to log in and launch a common Aperture library, and you use an iPhone... you may encounter permissions issues. The first sentence, as with other posts, is painfully specific to allow those of you who do not fall into this long-tail user category to save seconds of wasted life by not having to read any further.

A symptom of an unhealthy set of permissions in your Aperture library is a window popping up in iTunes announcing that a sync cannot be completed because you do not have permission. This may also occur because of permission issues with music or movie files.

Apart from selecting the problematic folder, hitting Command + i ("Get Info") and modifying the "Sharing and Permissions" settings, clicking the wheel and selecting "Apply to enclosed items", some possible solutions are:

1) Hold down the "Option" and "Command" keys as you launch Aperture. The following window will appear:

Run a "Consistency Check" (a built-in permissions check-like feature), relaunch, and run "Rebuild Now" (just for fun).

2) If you plan to share your Aperture library among users, you may consider using Disk Utility to create a sparse image disk, and save your Aperture library to it. Like FireWire drives, sparse image disks ignore permissions.

You may also notice that Aperture no longer offers to delete your iPhone pictures after syncing. First of all, best practice is to delete photos directly from the camera itself after you have verified a successful upload of images. However, like many of us I like to ignore best practice and delete directly from the application, as is possible using iPhoto. No more living dangerously, as, second, I'm unaware of any method of having Aperture delete photos from the iPhone.

If anyone know a way, I'd love to return to my reckless workflow...

We use two Apple TVs at the school to publish student projects. They provide a wonderful, interactive mechanism for accessing student work in the lobbies. However, not everything, even at Apple, always works as described.

One great feature of Apple TV is the ability to stream music from your iTunes library to your Apple TV.

What Apple, and any discussion forums, fail to mention is that this "feature" can often present the symptoms of a bug. In particular, depending on your Apple TV network connection (ethernet 100/1000, wireless g/n), the size of your iTunes library, and the content you're accessing, the streaming feature may in fact cause video to stutter and pause, or the remote to become unresponsive.

Don't despair, the solution is a check-box away. If your Apple TV is unresponsive enable the "Show only the synced items on my Apple TV" under the "Summary" tab of your Apple TV in iTunes.

This is a good news/bad news solution: you will be limited to playing only content stored on the Apple TV's internal hard drive, however, it will work.

Setting up prudent smart lists and clever syncing will give you all the dynamically changing content you want, even with the 40 GB drive, and help you avoid the perils of a slow or altogether unresponsive Apple TV.

Think of this setting as a mocha-java skinny-latte cappuccino for your Apple TV.

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If in your country the eyeTV program listings feature functions properly, read no further. Unless you really love macademic.info prose. And then you've got bigger problems, anyway.

eyeTV provides a good solution for Mac users to watch and record television on their Macs. The new version even enables streaming to other devices. Up until last year, a generous programmer, Guillaume Boudreau, provided a solution for the lack of EPG (Electronic Program Guide) support for Canadian customers. However, the solution stopped working when Zapt2It stopped making its data available.

(As an interesting side-note: many Canadians would be willing to pay for this service, but the company makes it virtually impossible to purchase the data from Canada... it is difficult to understand this business model strategy.)

In any event, necessity is the mother of invention. For Canadian users "Makemineamac" suggests this solution for Canadian users of eyeTV. It is abbreviated below:

1. Create an account at Schedules Direct ($20/year).
2. Add a new lineup to your Schedules Direct account by simply selecting the local TV provider you use.
3. Download the free, and fabulous, MacProgramGuide. Donations accepted. (And suggested by macademic.info.)

While this solution is not quite as slickly integrated as the Zap2It solution that the built-in program guide of eyeTV provides, it is a great alternative that involves only one or two additional clicks. Launch MacProgramGuide once you've created your SchedulesDirect account, find the program you'd like to record, and click the little "eyeTV" button at the bottom left of the MacProgramGuide window. Your program will be automatically added to the eyeTV recordings schedule.

Hope this helps with integrating media in your classroom.

And I swear, The Simpsons is educational.

The University of Kentucky has a clear document explaining procedures for storing video files and events information for iMovie '08.

In short, iMovie HD used an integrated, single "project" file model of storage: when you started a project, you'd have to import all the video you wanted to use into that one self-contained project document, and then edit it from within that document/project. This makes it simpler to keep track of everything you need for your project, and therefor, to keep it on an external FireWire drive, or internal Scratch Disk (a shared folder on the local Hard Drive).

iMovie '08, on the other hand, uses the now familiar multiple file directory structure of other programs (Final Cut Express, and Final Cut Pro for video, but also Pages uses a variation of this), where the content (the raw video footage) is stored in a separate location from the editing information (cuts, transitions, titles, etc.). The advantage of this is the ease of use for sharing content among projects. However, it does complicate storage as all footage becomes shared and accumulates quickly, filling up Hard Drive space, but it also makes it difficult for network accounts to work cleanly locally.

The U of K solution above, explains how to save the "iMovie Events" folder and "iMovie Projects" folders in non-default locations.

For educators, particularly at the primary level, this creates some complications.

We're still working them through.