But now a problem has arisen with the Apple TV devices (I own two). Some weeks ago — I’m not sure exactly, since I have been traveling heavily since the start of November — my Apple TV(s) started dropping their wireless connection with my dual-band N router (DLink DIR-825, hardware version B1, firmware 2.06NA). Prior to that time, I could start streaming a playlist from one of our computers that have iTunes libraries, and the music would play for hours. Now it’s hard to get it to play for more than an hour the Apple TV drops, then reestablishes the wireless connection (halting the playlist in the meantime). Sometimes it will happen two or three times in the space of 5 minutes; other times, it will run for a few hours before resetting. But the problem itself and its variability makes the Apple TV fairly useless for streaming audio and video.

I did some of the usual — rebooted the entire wireless network, did a restore on the Apple TV, swapped the two Apple TV devices, made sure both had the latest software updates, and so on. Same problem. Searches on the ‘net showed that people have complained about similar or identical problems going back to 2010, but my problem didn’t start until about 6 weeks ago — my Apple TVs were pretty solid before then.

I ran a test earlier today which strongly suggests that the problem does lie with Apple TV. The living room Apple TV sits side-by-side with that Roku 2 device; both are hooked up to the same TV and are the same distance from the router (which, by the way, is only about 25-30′ away; most of that distance is open air, and there are no walls in-between). As it turns out, both the Apple TV and the Roku 2 support Netflix. So I fired up the Roku and picked a relatively short film to play (Blackadder’s A Christmas Carol). Said film played perfectly all the way through with no pauses, stutters, hiccups, or other issues. I then switched over to the Apple TV, brought up Netflix there, and selected the same film. It played fine for about the first 14 minutes — and then went into a pause mode (rotating circular arrow). Every few minutes, it would come out of that mode, play for another few seconds, then go back into pause mode again. This went on for a good half hour before I finally killed it.

I have yet another test running as I type this: I have both Apple TVs connected to the same router band (the same one the Roku is connected to), streaming audio from the same iTunes library (on this laptop) simultaneously. If one drops the wireless connection and the other doesn’t, then that increases the chances that it is in fact an Apple TV problem. So far, both are running fine (of course).

In the meantime, if others of you have encountered this problem and have known solutions, please let me know.  ..bruce..

Back in July 2010, I bought an Acer Aspire easyStore Home Server running Windows Home Server 2003, primarily two solve two problems: (1) run nightly backups of all my Wintel PCs; (2) provide a common media file repository for myself and my wife (who runs Macs). After a few bumps, it worked just fine and has been working fine since.

Except that a few months ago — which at this point may mean something like this past summer or even late spring, given how time flies — I noticed that I could no longer run the WHS Console app from any of my PCs (all running Win7 Pro). Any attempt to do so resulted in an error box with the message:

This computer cannot connect to your home server. Check your network connection and make sure your home server is powered on. If your home server has recently restarted, try again in a few minutes.

Here’s what’s strange: the server itself still shows up in the Network panel, I can still access all the shares, and I can still log onto the server via the Remote Desktop Connection application (and, by the way, run the Console app there, on the server itself). I can ping the server in a console window via its name and its (fixed) IP address. And the automated backups keep happening (though more on this below).

At roughly the same time — and it may have been exactly the same time — I began to get certificate warnings when I used RDC to log into the server. This is a well-known problem with a kludgy work-around (configure RDC to ignore certificate warnings). That problem appears to be associated with Service Pack 1 of Windows 7, and I suspect the Console problem showed up at the same time as well.

However, to date, I have not found a workaround to the Console problem. What’s more, I’m starting to have backup problems. In particular, one desktop system stopped backing up. In an effort to fix that, I uninstalled the WHS Connector Software and attempted to re-install it. No go — I get this error during installation, after entering the server’s admin password:

This operation cannot be completed at this time.

Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact Product Support.

This appears to be a well-known, if intermittent, problem, but one for which a variety of suggested-but-not-necessarily-effective solutions have been offered. I started to tackle the problem again this morning, trying some of the solutions, and found some other oddities:

• Even though I can see my server (which we’ll call foo-bar for now) in the Network panel, can access it, can ping it (by name or by IP), and can remotely log into it, I cannot bring it up in a browser, e.g., http://foo-bar or even http://<fixed IP address>. That last one is particularly surprising.
• Yesterday, I brought down and then brought back up my entire home-wide network (modem, router, access point, lots of computers and other network-accessing devices). I noticed that the Acer server box took forever (probably 15+ minutes) to reboot itself and reappear on the network.
• I’ve been getting flaky behavior from WHS itself over the past few months when I remotely log in (which I don’t do that often). For example, when I logged in today, I got three standard Windows “unexpected error – send info to Microsoft?” boxes, all associated with the backup utility.
• I did bring up the Computer Management panel on the server, thinking that the inability to browse to the server may depending on something running here. I did find that IIS Admin Services was not running and would not start, even though its two dependencies (RPC and Security Accounts) were, in fact, running.

I suspect that what I may actually need to do is reinstall WHS 2003, but that means that I will have to (for safety’s sake) back up the (non-automated) shares. Not a bad thing to do anyway, but not how I envisioned spending my Thanksgiving weekend.

What struck me while researching on-line is how many people had posts that said, in effect, “I did this and it fixed everything”, followed by posts saying, “I tried that and it still doesn’t work”. Similarly, not everyone running the same systems gets the same problems. It goes to the heart of the underlying complexity, uncertainty, and — to a certain extent — unknowability of the systems upon which we depend.

That said, I welcome suggestions.   ..bruce..

Today, I bought a new (smaller) TV for our bedroom, replacing one that we have had for 8 or 9 years. On impulse, while picking out the TV at Costco, I also picked up a Roku 2 kit (Roku 2, HDMI cable, 2 month subscription to HuluPlus). I figured it would be interesting to see the comparison. Once home, I set up the new TV, hooked up the Roku 2 to it, and started the Roku 2 setup process. I got it talking to my in-home LAN (dual-band 802.11N router), and it signaled successful connection all the way out to the internet. It then told me that an update was available and gave me no other option than to download that update. Not a problem, I thought — always want the latest software.

Sigh. The Roku was never able to download the upgrade, and — this is critical — gave me no option to proceed to use the device without the upgrade. I made half a dozen attempts (all with the same failure, Code 011, unable to connect to Roku server), went to roku.com/support and had a nice chat with Jane, who suggested I reconfigure my router with explicit DNS addresses and then reboot my network. Did so — same problem.  She opined that the Roku server might be having troubles, or that it might be some other unspecified error.

Just to make sure there wasn’t some specific problem with the actual physical location of the Roku 2, I went out to the living room, unplugged my Apple TV, brought it into the bedroom, and plugged it in sitting right where the Roku 2 had been. Worked like a charm. I then went to Amazon and ordered a second Apple TV unit (scheduled to be delivered Saturday morning for just $3.99 in shipping, even though I ordered it Thursday evening — Amazon Prime is just brilliant).

I will probably hang onto the Roku 2 unit and in fact will likely connect it to the living room TV (along with the new Apple TV unit). Assuming that I can get it to update itself and let me use it, I’d like to see what it offers that’s different and/or better than Apple TV. But having had a fair amount of contact with Steve Jobs back during his NeXT days, I know that one of his product mantras was, “It just works.”

The Apple TV, like so many Apple consumer products, just works. And that’s why Apple wins.

[UPDATED 12/19/2011] Of course, having written that firm statement, I am now having problems with my Apple TV units. In the meantime, I did finally get the Roku 2 to register the day after I wrote this post, and it is working fine even though my Apple TV is not. Sigh…

A few years later — in 1982 — my close friend Wayne Holder hired me into his nascent software company, Oasis Systems, in part to help with his existing and planned word processing utilities (The Word Plus, Punctuation + Style), but mostly to develop computer games. And we did, developing Sundog: Frozen Legacy on the Apple II, a game for which I still get e-mails (and which Wayne is even now working on resurrecting for modern platforms). In January 1984, a few months before Sundog shipped, we were invited by Guy Kawasaki to come up to Apple to see a preview of the Mac and to talk about what software we could port to the Mac. Through my connections with computer stores in San Diego, I was able to get a personal loan of a Mac for a few days at home prior to the official announcement in Cupertino later that month, which Wayne and I attended as well. That was my first time seeing Steve Jobs in person, and it remains a memorable highlight of my professional life.

When the Mac shipped a few days later, I went down to the one computer store in San Diego that I knew would be getting machines from Apple. I took $3000 in cash with me and managed to convince the store owner — a friend — to let me have one of the three Macs he had to sell. Through a connection with Phil Lemmons — editor-in-chief at BYTE — I ended up writing the official BYTE review of the 128K Macintosh (August 1984 issue). By the end of 1984, I was writing full-time for BYTE, including on-going coverage of the Macintosh, particularly once my BYTE column started in mid-1985. After a few years of writing for BYTE, I switched to writing for Macworld magazine. Steve was now long-gone from Apple, and Apple was having some of its own problems going forward.

But in late 1987, I was contacted by Addison-Wesley. They were interested in having me write a book about Steve Jobs’ new project at NeXT. Folks at NeXT had apparently suggested me to Addison-Wesley, probably due to my writing at BYTE and Macworld. I leapt at the opportunity, particularly since in coincided with our family moving from Utah to just outside Santa Cruz (where I would be doing technical writing for Borland on a consulting basis). Once there, I found myself invited to visit NeXT HQ on Deer Creek Road, sit in on meetings, and attend the 0.3 NeXTstep Dev Camp. And, yes, that meant getting actual face time with Steve Jobs as well — not a lot, but this was a man whose creations had been impacting my personal and professional life for over a decade at this point.

The writing of the book dragged out as I waited to get my hands on an actual NeXT cube, which finally happened (if I recall correctly) at the end of 1988 or early 1989. I wrote the first several drafts of the book on that NeXT cube itself. The book came out in the fall of 1989; it remains the single most successful book I’ve ever written, due to the intense interest in NeXT itself, more than any particular writing skills or technical insight on my part.

The following year, I found myself working with a world-class typographer (Mike Parker) and graphic designer (Vic Spindler) to create a design-oriented desktop publishing system. I was doing all the software prototyping on my NeXT cube, and we made the decision to make the NeXT our first target platform. For five years — 1990 to 1995 — I served as chief architect and CTO at Pages Software Inc, where we developed Pages by Pages and then WebPages, while spending nearly two years just trying to raise venture funding. We closed on funding at the start of 1992 and shipped our first version of Pages in early 1994. We quickly sold all that we were going to in the all-too-small NeXTstep market. My frustrations at seeing larger firm try to leverage off of NeXT’s incredible innovations led to an op-ed piece in the November 1994 issue of BYTE, “Whither NextStep?” The day that issue came out was the last time that Steve Jobs and I spoke — he called me from the back of a car somewhere to ask me what the hell I was doing writing that. I said, telling the truth. Pages would close its door the next year, unable to secure additional funding to move its technology to Windows.

When Steve engineered his brilliant reverse takeover of Apple — getting Apple to buy NeXT for $400 million, then slowly moving himself into the CEO seat — I was not optimistic. I still had unconditional praise for the NextStep technology, but I was dubious about Steve’s ability to sell technology to markets and to compete with Microsoft.

Boy, was I wrong. I was not only wrong about his abilities at Apple, I was wrong in my BYTE article about NextStep being on a downward slope. NextStep, of course, was the foundation of Mac OS X, and Steve transformed Apple into the most-admired, most-imitated, and most-valuable company in the world. And I was tickled that, when Apple brought out its own word processor, it was named “Pages”. Steve had always liked that name when we were developing (and shipping) our own product years before; glad he was able to use it.

To quote John Perry Barlow over on FB, “The world is suddenly a less interesting place.” ..bruce w..

[1] The first was an HP-67 card-reading programmable calculator.

[Cross-posted from And Still I Persist]

While the concept was great, I found this case less useful than I had hoped. The keyboard was small and had a non-standard layout on the right side (no right Shift key; several other keys in different locations), which was frustrating for me, a touch-typist. Furthermore, it had a tendency to lose bluetooth connectivity with the iPad while I was using it; I’d be in the middle of typing, and suddenly the keyboard I was using would stop working and the on-screen iPad keyboard would appear. (Looking at the reviews of the Kensington unit over on Amazon, I found that I was not alone in having this problem.) I passed it to my wife, who encountered many of the same problems, and it generally got set aside.

However, a week ago, I spotted a new iPad case with keyboard on ThinkGeek: the ZAGGMate with keyboard, from ZAGG, Inc. I ordered it; it showed up; and so far, I’m very, very happy with it.

Unlike the earlier black-folio case, the ZAGGmate is an aluminum shell with a keyboard inside. For carrying purposes, you place your iPad face down into the shell, and you end up with what looks like a solid aluminum unit (the ZAGGmate aluminum matches the back of the iPad). To use your iPad, you simply pull it out of the case (which is notched along one side to allow you to pry the iPad out). You can then either use your iPad as you normally would, or you can prop it in a trough inside the case and use the keyboard.

This approach has several immediate advantages over  the earlier iPad keyboard case. First, the folio case only allows one orientation for the iPad: horizontal, with the home button to the right. The ZAGGmate not only allows you either horizontal orientation, it also allows you either vertical orientation as well. I personally find writing on the iPad more pleasant and productive in horizontal mode; I can see more of the text at once.

Second, the iPad rests in a trough that’s more than a full inch in from the back side of the case. That means that an iPad + ZAGGmate has an overall smaller footprint (depth + height) than most netbooks, which can be critical if you’re trying to get work done seated in coach on an airplane.

Third, since the iPad is just sitting in the trough (with a plastic prop behind it), you can easily pick it up and use it sans keyboard (such as for games), then set it down when you want to use the ZAGGmate keyboard again.

Fourth, the ZAGGmate with the iPad stored is only about half the thickness of the folio case with the iPad inside.

Unlike the keyboard in the folio case I bought earlier, the ZAGGmate keyboard has a near-standard layout, including a Right shift key and all the other keys in expected places. The only real problem I’ve had with this keyboard — aside from the size, which is the same problem I’ve had with my Acer netbook and the folio iPad case — is that the space bar is flush with the bottom edge of the case. This means I have to use a different motion with my right thumb do actually get the space bar to go down.  As a result, I still sometimes either miss spaces or hit two.

That’s a small complaint, though. On the other hand, several of the function keys across the top are mapped to iPad functions: home, search, slideshow, black screen, play/track, volume/mute. There is even a key to bring up the iPad on-screen keyboard, should you want to pick up the iPad and still do typing. Note that the ZAGGmate keyboard is still active as well, so you don’t have to reconnect.

I haven’t had a single bluetooth dropoff to date with the ZAGGmate. In fact, the only bluetooth problem I’ve had was figuring where the ‘bluetooth button’ was. Yes, it is that little LED right above the bluetooth symbol — it’s actually a tactile switch underneath the surface, and you need to be brave enough to press hard enough until you hear it click.

Note that this review is for the iPad 1 version of the ZAGGmate (and, for that matter, of the black folio case). Both ZAGG and Kensington have iPad 2 versions that are coming out.

Recommended.  ..bruce..

The first key step was buying a Windows Home Server box last summer. It took me a while to get all the kinks out (read my review at the link), but since then it was worked pretty much trouble-free, 24/7. Not only do my various computers get backed up each night, but it’s become the standard iTunes repository for both my wife and me, and we use it to share (legally) media that we purchase separately on iTunes.

The next step was upgrading our internet access. We live in a semi-rural area outside of Denver, and when we moved here 6 years ago, our only internet access options were a dedicated T1 line (our next-door neighbor had one), satellite access, or a wide-area wireless (with dedicated dish pointing to an access point about 6 miles away). We went with the last option, which was given us roughly DSL-grade access (1.5Mb). However, about six months ago, we started getting flyers from Qwest claiming that high-speed phone line access was finally available in our area. We signed up and found ourselves with access speeds running typically from 4 to 12 Mbits/sec. Not much compared to some of the very high speed (>100 Mbits) access available in some cities now, but a major step up from what we’ve been living with.

The third step was getting a new HD large-screen TV this past week — in this case, as an astonishingly generous gift from our youngest daughter and her boyfriend. We bought our existing Sony 42″ plasma TV some 8+ years ago, and I won’t tell you what we paid for it then. Not only was it getting long in the tooth, with the display losing contrast, but the TV itself only had one (1) set of component inputs; the other four were all composite/S-video, and there were no HDMI ports at all. The new TV (a 55″ Sony LCD) has a much sharper and clearer picture as well as up-to-date ports (4 HDMI ports, an optical audio out, etc.).

The fourth step was buying an Apple TV unit today. This not only gives us Netflix streaming, it recognizes and lets us access that iTunes media share on our WHS box. [UPDATE: But wait! Not really! See below.] After getting it hooked up, I sat down and watched an episode of “Castle” that I had downloaded from iTunes (and moved onto the server) but had not yet watched.I then listened to some of the music on the server, then went out and connected to one of what appear to be at least a few hundred streaming radio stations from the ‘net. Oh, and I watched a few minutes of both a TV show and a movie from Netflix (we are long-time Netflix subscribers).

To quote the great Steverino, it all just works.  And it works beautifully, too — the video and sound quality is outstanding.

I’ll note in here that a few days ago I bought a Sony Blu-Ray player with ‘net connectivity. It actually sees more of the computer on our home network, but it does not recognize or play iTunes media. If it did, I probably wouldn’t have bought the Apple TV unit.

As per the headline, this is almost enough to persuade me to drop our DirecTV subscription. Almost, but not enough. I love college football and especially love watching it in high-def. I also watch (or at least have on in the background) a lot of local and national news. If and when I have streaming options for those that I like, then DirecTV will likely go away; it’s just not worth the cost.

I give it a year or so.  ..bruce..

UPDATE: Thought I was going crazy there for a while. After seeing the stuff on my WHS box, I went back later and found I could only see stuff on my Win7 laptop (which is where I keep all my ‘active’  iTunes media and where I sync my iPhone and my iPad). I thought maybe I misread what I was seeing, but then I disabled and then re-enabled iTunes sharing on my WHS box, then brought up iTunes on my Win7 laptop. The WHS iTunes library showed up in my laptop’s iTunes app — and now all the media files on my WHS box are showing up as well. But it will only play the files on my laptop. Any attempt to select, say, a TV show episode that’s only on the WHS box results in an error message.

So, I’ve got a couple of choices: install iTunes on my WHS box (which is not as straightforward as I would like) or move all the iTunes media on the WHS box onto Sandra’s MacPro (where her iTunes library resides and which, fortunately, has a couple of terabytes of free internal disk space). Since the Apple TV readily sees her iTunes library, and since her MacPro (unlike my laptop) is almost always on, that may be the easiest solution. Stay tuned.

I’ve written here before about the thermocline of truth. The webcomic Partially Clips gives a different, humorous slant; click on the comic to view it in full size. ..bruce..

Wayne Holder, founder of FTL Games and co-designer of Sundog: Frozen Legacy, is seriously contemplating bringing Sundog back to modern platforms. But he needs to get a sense of the level of interest for such a game. Drop me a line here and let me know:

• if you are interested in seeing Sundog available again
• what platform(s) you would like to see it on
• if you would like to be added to a mailing list for news of Sundog

In the meantime, I’ll be contacting those who have sent me e-mails in the past with the same questions. Look forward to hearing from you.  ..bruce..

I poked around on-line a bit, found some other similar complaints, but found no clear solution or even explanation as to what was causing the problem. Since the iPad doesn’t expose its file system, I had no direct way (via Apple software) of examining it. So I went out and bought a 3rd-party application (the regular kind, not an iPad app) named Phone Disk, which — like several other similar apps — allows the iPad to be mounted as if it were an external hard drive. It worked as advertised, and some browsing via the Finder found that the iTunes Music folder held 40 GB of files — which was more or less the sum of the Music, Video, and Other segments as displayed in iTunes. None of the other folders on the iPad could account for that extra 10 GB, so it was pretty clear that the 10 GB of “Other” was hiding amongst the music and video files.

Next step was to unsync all music and video from her iPad. That done, the 9.9 GB of “Other” still showed up in the iTunes display. Checked the iPad directly with Phone Disk and, yes, there were still 10 GB of files in the iTunes/Music folder. I started opening the individual subfolders in Music and found a random assortment of audio and video files: songs, TV shows, movies (including at least one expired rental), even though the iPod and Video apps both claimed there was no music nor video on the iPad at all. There were never more than 3 or 4 files in a given subfolder, and many subfolders had no files as all.

I deleted all these files manually (via Phone Disk/Finder), then re-synced the iPad. Boom! (as Steve would say): that 9.9 GB of “Other” was now a tiny sliver measured in megabytes.

I’m not sure what was causing these file to be left behind, unrecognized by the iPad and Video apps; I did note that a large number (though not all) of the unrecognized files all had the same date (Nov 8, 2010). On the other hand, one of the “left behind” files was dated just this morning (a TV show episode that my wife had downloaded and synced); curiously, in the iTunes library on her MacPro, that TV show episode appeared twice. In any event, it’s clear that there are occasions in which media files are considered by the on-board iPod and Video apps to be wiped from the iPad but nevertheless remain on the iPad file system, taking up space.

Having looked at my wife’s iPad, I synced mine as well, and I see that I have nearly 2 GB of “Other” on mine. I plan to use Phone Disk (I bought a family license) and go through the same examination (and possible cleanup) of my iTunes files on the iPad. I’ll report back if I find anything interesting.  ..bruce..

It didn’t work.The adapter showed up as a network connection, but it was disabled and would not let it self be enabled. I went through some of the usual first steps (uninstall, reboot, re-install), but they didn’t work. I searched the net for newer drivers, and found some — went through the uninstall/reboot/install new drivers cycle. Plugged the USB device it. Same problem. There were comments in some of the on-line forums that this particular adapter didn’t work with Windows 7, so I figured that was likely my problem.

The next day, I stopped by the same store and bought a different USB wireless adapter, this one clearly marketed “Compatible with Windows 7!” Went through the installation cycle, and this one didn’t work either. Looked for newer drivers, found them, downloaded and installed them — still no luck. Used Google to search for similar complaints, and I found them, one of which spoke to my situation. The user had Zone Alarm installed on his system. He said that he had found that he could successfully install the network adapter only if he completely uninstalled Zone Alarm — not just turned it off, but actually uninstalled it — then installed the adapter, then re-installed Zone Alarm. I tried the same thing, and it worked. Of course, as I wrote about two days ago, I then started getting BSODs on my Gateway box, which had never happened before; my eventual solution was to uninstall Zone Alarm and replace it with Microsoft Security Essentials. I frankly wonder in retrospect whether that would have solved my problem with re-installing my Sprint U301 device as well.

I’ve written these last three posts to chronicle these solutions to anyone else who might be having these same problems (and, as I noted two days ago, to apologize to HP and Microsoft for putting the original blame on them for my multitude of BSODs). We’ll now move on to some other topics for a while.  ..bruce..