Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Use S60 as a remote for Macs, iTunes

Do you have a Nokia (S60) phone and want to control your computer with it? Read on.

My previous cell phone (SE w810i) had a pretty decent bluetooth remote that I could use to control the mouse cursor and various media players I use (iTunes, mPlayer, Quicktime, etc…). It was cool but didn’t really have much to offer that wasn’t already in the standard Apple remote.  However, I liked not having to remember the dedicated remote if I was traveling though so when I got my Nokia N95 last year, I was disappointed that it didn’t have a bluetooth remote as a standard. Problem solved: Salling Clicker.

I haven’t tried them all but it has custom remotes for programs like Powerpoint, Keynote, VLC and Quicktime. In addition to controlling your slides, for Powerpoint and Keynote, this app uses the phone’s screen to display presentation notes too. Could be useful?

What I’ve been into most has been controlling iTunes via wifi from the opposite end of my house.  There’s a lot of potential here – especially for homes that have in-wall speakers connected to one system. Clicker’s iTunes interface reminds a bit of a classic iPod but with the added luxury of a search feature. Here’s a screenshot:

This app was released nearly two years ago but it’s new to me and using it makes me feel like I’m in the future! The home automation industry is slowly catching onto using cell phones instead of remotes but there is still a way to go. Imagine using programs like this to easily control lighting with your phone? USB powered designer floor lamps?

I should end this, nerdiest-post-ever, now but here’s a photo of a house I shot last fall. Within it, a lot of automation work was done to control lighting and A/V equipment. See that little circle near the edge of the green wall? That’s a sensor connected to the thermostat! You could probably program that remote in the bottom right to make you coffee.

Startup question marks and backing up your HD

A few months ago, starting up my computer resulted in an intermittent question mark flashing on my screen without going any further. Not good. I called Apple and consulted their support article for said problem. Nothing. I thought I’d share my experience because while it was annoying, it helped me learn a bit how startup disks work.

My harddrive would start up but it could no longer boot OS X properly. On one of the last times it worked properly, I quickly backed up the internal 100gb disk using a great program called Caron Copy Cloner and the SATA cradle I wrote about a while back.

For a while (longer than I should have), my computer was booting from this external drive. Imagine the computer as a living body whose heart, linked via USB, existed outside said body. Not pretty.

Nowhere close to as mobile as I normally liked to be, the alternative was going without a computer for a week while AppleCare tried fixing it. In the end, I decided what should have been an obvious option: upgrade the internal drive from 100gb to 320gb. The downside: Even with a dead drive, this upgrade was not at all covered under AppleCare. Bummer but it does feel nice to have a bit more (3.2x) storage space in my machine.

In other news, I don’t normally go for this stuff but the Belkin Flexible USB Cable Adapter is a neat gadget that has made it easier for me to constantly have a USB cable protruding from the side of my computer.

Zooming in on photos on an iPod

This is old and maybe it’s irrelevant in this iPhone, iPod Touch world but after the data/charging cable on my cellphone has been crapping out*, i needed another way to portably zoom in on an image.  While iPods (photo & video) can display images, the viewing mode is set to an unmodifiable “fit to screen” mode which isn’t that convenient if, say, you need to look at a Google Map of a specific area in Berlin.

I found my way to LittleAppleScripts.com though and found a little script called SplittingImage that properly slices a single photo to fit little sections of it on an iPod display. It’s simple to use and can be quite useful.

*My phone is a Sony Ericsson w810i and while this is apparently a common problem, I haven’t been able to find the source of it or a solution. Any ideas? Anyone?

Freeing hard drive space on internal drives

My computer has an internal 100gb drive.  To protect myself, I have a pair of 250gb external drives that mirror off eachother where I store photos, movies and music.  Naturally, I rely on my internal drive a lot – something that has been more challenging lately as I have been regularly working with less than 5gb of free space.  I like to keep photos from the last two or three months saved on my laptop in case I ever have to quickly access them while traveling but the space issue has made this difficult.

Enter Disk Inventory X (free!) ! This program, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at first, graphically illustrates the size of each file on your computer.  I hadn’t used this program in a while so it came as a surprise to me when it found me an Adobe Bridge file called filesystem_blobs.MYD that was over 5gb in size.  sleepimage is another file that was about 2gb in size.  Both of these are self-generating and relatively non crucial.  I deleted them and the world is now a more harmonious place!

In my case, I also noticed various .msf files somehow created by Thunderbird (which I don’t use) were taking up room so I got rid of those too!

Remember the days when a 500mb hard drive with 4mb of RAM was almost unbelievable?

To end on a sidenote, if you have a Mac and are tired of embarrassing yourself with the startup chime after you’ve arrived late to class or to a meeting, check out Psst! (free again!), a program that controls the volume of this startup sound. Cool.

Disk Inventory X (free!)
Psst! (free again!)