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MacOS X error 0×80020022 trying to burn DVDs

Feb 20

Posted by Randy Hunt in Software, Technology

After being tremendously frustrated with my iMac failing to burn DVDs, and stressing myself out over what media might be supported, I’ve hit upon the solution to my problem: unicode characters.

I wanted to burn a DVD containing AVIs of Russian video, and I had given the Burn Folder a Russian name. Every time I tried to burn, I was greeted with error 0×80020022, and the media was immediately ejected.

Remembering the days of CD-R media and the compatibility hassles I once experienced, my first thought was to go buy a different brand of DVD media. But I experienced the error with the new media as well.

After stumbling onto a Mac support forum in which users blindly suggested that renaming a file had fixed the problem, I realized that I was probably trying to use forbidden characters in the volume name. Spelling my Russian words out in a Latin alphabet did the trick, and I am now burning the files.

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Ten tips about something I know nothing about

Dec 10

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

I can’t help noticing that the majority of blog posts these days are lists of advice about things that are either common sense or utter bullshit.

The best ones, though, are those that propose a list of ten must do strategies for using an unproven technology in an undocumented business sector in relation to a prediction of things that haven’t even happened yet.

For example:

  • Top 10 priorities for online marketing in 2010
  • Eight things you must do in order to succeed on Twitter
  • 12 ways to be the better than everyone else, even the millions of other people who will also read this article
  • 9 surefire ways to know that I’m a full-of-shit author and not an SEO expert
  • The 8 keys to showing others that I’ve never actually done the thing I’m writing about

There’s an old saying that goes “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” Obviously, that phrase was coined before the internet came along and made experts out of everyone.

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App Approval

Dec 9

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

I see a lot of complaints from developers about Apple’s app approval process. But here’s the thing: If developers aren’t complaining about app approval, it means someone, somewhere, is not doing their job right. If apps went out the way developers wanted them to, they’d have ugly interfaces, poor memory management, and no error checking whatsoever.

Personally, I like Apple’s app approval process. And I like the fact that it’s rigid and painful. In fact, I don’t think it’s rigid enough. I’d like to see them make it even harder to put apps like “iFart” online.

But, like it or not, iFart isn’t going to cause a system crash when you receive a phone call while using it. And that’s what’s important. The iPhone isn’t just a handheld computing platform…. it’s also a phone. And that means it has to work. It can’t be crashing all the time. And Apple’s process helps make that a reality.

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Barnes and Noble “Nook”

Oct 21

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

Yesterday, Barnes and Noble released their new e-book reader called the nook, billing it as “the world’s most advanced e-book reader”. I don’t think “nook” is a very catchy name, in spite of rhyming with book… but that’s another story.

I’ve made no secret in the past about my dislike, even distrust, of eBook readers. Especially the Kindle, which I vow to never own after their 1984 debacle.

As I’ve discussed the subject with friends and colleagues, my opinion has refined quite a bit, and my basic points come down to:

  1. The price of a book reflected heavy publishing costs, including equipment, materials, labor, and distribution… none of which apply to eBooks, making them rather expensive in comparison.
  2. Real books can be shared with friends, given away, or re-sold, but while the format of data makes doing this even easier, the licensing applied to eBooks prohibits doing so.
  3. Real books don’t stop working when a battery dies.
  4. Dropping a book in a puddle, losing it while on the bus, are misfortunes that only cost a few dollars to correct, a far smaller amount than the cost of even the cheapest ebook reader.
  5. Dropping a book on the floor, or accidentally sitting on it does nothing to reduce your ability to read it later… and in fact, people often use books to hold things up, to sit on, to stand on, etc.
  6. None of the books I would most desire to replace are available as ebooks. I enjoy turning the pages of a novel, but I’d love to be able to carry around dozens or hundreds of reference books without breaking my back.
  7. By that same measure, most students would also love to stop breaking their backs with textbooks, but no ebook reader yet has solved the problems of universal page numbers or of jotting notes in the margins.
  8. And finally, they take away all those expected advantages of real books without giving any significant new adantages in return.

While the Nook offers many advantages over the Kindle, including built-in WiFi, direct loading and reading of PDFs, replacable batteries, and synchronized annotations, it only overcomes one of my stated hurdles, and only to a limited extent. Nook allows you “loan to a friend”, but it does not allow you to “give” to a friend. Nor does it allow you to re-sell to anyone.

As far as I can tell, all Barnes and Noble did was add a touch-sensitive LCD screen to the bottom of a Kindle, and add a half-baked book loaning mechanism. That may be enough to lure in people who want a Kindle but were scared off by the 1984 debacle… but I don’t believe it’s going to be enough to coax any book converts.

So what would it take to convert me — and lots of others like me — to ebooks? Pressure publishers to make searchable ebook versions of reference materials.

Working 9-to-5 in information technology, I have acquired a large library of reference books on programming languages, APIs, systems, data formats, and so on. If I could carry all of those (dozens of books) to work with me on a small device, I’d jump on the opportunity, but none of those materials are available in ebook format.

And when I’m not at work, my two most time-consuming activities are photography and language study. Admittedly, it will be a long time before photographic quality is available on ebook readers, but current readers are already capable of displaying language lessons… and most even support MP3 playback for the accompanying audio materials. I have an entire bookshelf at home dedicated to beginner, intermediate, and advanced books and CDs for Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, French, Ukrainian, and Portuguese, which I would happily trade for even a mostly disfunctional e-reader if I could, but unfortunately, those materials are simply not available in any other format at present.

For companies with the leverage of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, it should be a no-brainer to lean on those publishers. Today, all books are written in an electronic format to begin with. Why should it be so hard to simply run that original through some converter and do a little bit of editing, and produce the single most useful argument for a higher-profit, lower-overhead version of their product?

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The Apple tablet computer

Oct 7

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

MacBook Touch Mockup

MacBook Touch Mockup

The rumor mill has been flying for a while, and I think enough has been confirmed for us to say confidently that Apple is definitely going to release a tablet computer in the beginning of 2010. At this point, I believe we can safely say that computer will have a 10-inch electrostatic touch sensitive screen (like the iPhone), and it will most likely have a HSPDA connection to AT&T.

The part that’s unclear, though, is… well… everything else about it.

But here’s my theory:

The MacBook Air was an incredibly cool new addition to Apple’s laptop lineup, but it was really mostly a sales dud by most measures… and I think the only reason for that was that the price was too high. But I believe the Air was merely an interim product — a way to begin recovering some of the costs associated with designing a completely disconnected, paper-thin computer.

Think about it: if you take a paper-thin tablet computer, lose the touch-screen, and add a keyboard… what are you left with, if not a MacBook air?

So what, then, do I expect to see? I think the iTablet (or whatever they choose to call it) will be exactly that: a MacBook Air, sans keyboard. I believe it will fit into a manilla envelope the way the Air does… and I believe that alone will be enough to distinguish it from all the other tablet computer offerings we’ve seen so far. A 10-inch tablet that fits in an envelope is exactly what every traveler on earth wants.

But that’s not enough. OS X has had some excellent handwriting recognition software for quite a while, but it will be better if I don’t need a tablet to enter it. Such features make this an easy Kindle killer. And in fact, if you include a stylus and allow me to write directly on the screen, you might as well go that extra step allow me to use my new iTablet as the world’s best ever replacement for a Wacom tablet.

And if the rumors I’ve heard about it pairing magically with the iMac as a second screen are true, well, how could you not think it’s worth that $799-999 rumored price?

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Microsoft still doesn’t get it

Jun 2

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

I wonder if Microsoft will ever learn. Probably not.

These guys have a history of never doing anything new. They see what others are doing, and they try to recreate it. They overload their copy with tons of extra features, and then they claim theirs is the best.

They’re too close to the technology. The brains at Microsoft design things that other brains can operate — devices laden with options and features, designed for power users, as if everyone in the world were a power user.

Microsoft saw the MacOS and gave us Windows. Microsoft saw WordPerfect and gave us Word. Microsoft saw AppleWorks and gave us Excel. Microsoft saw Netscape and gave us Internet Explorer.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Windows, Excel, Word, and IE are all successful products. Yes, but they’re all worse than the products they copied. Microsoft’s success on these products was built on the strength of their market share, not on the quality of the products. Those products succeeded by brute force marketing tactics, not by innovation.

You don’t believe me? Microsoft saw the iPod, and gave us the Zune. Oops. Microsoft saw the Playstation and gave us the XBox. Oops. Granted, in the case of the XBox, their R&D team added value in the followup: the XBox 360 actually innovated.

But now Microsoft sees the Wii… and in typical Microsoft fashion, they’ve decided to try to kill it with brute force. Just have a look at what Microsoft has planned for their next game box.

No controllers? Body recognition? Perhaps the marketing guys who made that video never considered that a fat guy can’t jump like a skinny kid. If fat guys and skinny kids and nerds and athletes and cripples could all do the same things, they would be out there in the real world competing at them.

The reason kung-fu games are popular is because they give fat guys and skinny kids a way of being the badass that they’ll never get to be in real life. It doesn’t matter what your genes are — as long as you have the capacity to press buttons with your hands or feet or whatever, you can become a martial arts master, or ride a snowboard, or drive a Ferrari, or kill terrorists. No exercise or special diet necessary.

Hey, Microsoft! Go ahead and release your “Wii killer”. You’ll learn a really valuable lesson. Or, more likely, you won’t learn a thing. You never have.

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Are you kidding me?

Jan 15

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

MacBook Air

Apple just never ceases to impress me. This is another home-run. Go watch the video and see how huge this tiny little laptop really is.

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More on the Amazon Kindle

Nov 28

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

David Pogue neatly sums up my thoughts on eBook readers:

Sure, the idea has appeal: an e-reader lets you carry hundreds of books, search or jump to any spot in the text and bump up the type size when your eyes get tired.

But the counterarguments are equally persuasive. Printed books are dirt cheap, never run out of power and survive drops, spills and being run over. And their file format will still be readable 200 years from now.

So e-book readers keep on coming and keep on flopping: the Rocket eBook Reader. Gemstar. Everybook. SoftBook. Librius Millennium Reader. The Sony Reader is in stores even now, priced at $350 and making literally dozens of sales.

Then he goes on to (*cough*) praise the Kindle:

So if the Kindle isn’t a home run, it’s at least an exciting triple. It gets the important things right: the reading experience, the ruggedness, the super-simple software setup. And that wireless instant download — wow.

Even though most people will prefer the feel, the cost and the simplicity of a paper book, the Kindle is by far the most successful stab yet at taking reading material into the digital age.

No, it’s not the last word in book reading. But once its price comes down and its design gets sleeker, the Kindle may be the beginning of a great new chapter.

You can dress up your criticism as nicely as you want. Saying they didn’t get it right is still synonymous with saying they got it wrong.

I thing I like Robert Scoble’s straight-to-the-point summation:

1. No ability to buy paper goods from Amazon through Kindle.
2. Usability sucks. They didn’t think about how people would hold this device.
3. UI sucks. Menus? Did they hire some out-of-work Microsoft employees?
4. No ability to send electronic goods to anyone else. I know Mike Arrington has one. I wanted to send him a gift through this of Alan Greenspan’s new book. I couldn’t. That’s lame.
5. No social network. Why don’t I have a list of all my friends who also have Kindles and let them see what I’m reading?
6. No touch screen. The iPhone has taught everyone that I’ve shown this to that screens are meant to be touched. Yet we’re stuck with a silly navigation system because the screen isn’t touchable.

Would I buy it? Yes, but I’m a geek. I can’t really recommend this to other people yet. Sorry.

It’s obvious that they never had this device in their hands when they were designing it.

Look. When the rubber meets the road, it’s still just a gadget. It’s not practical. It does some cool things, but so did Apple’s Newton, Microsoft’s Bob, and countless other neat, geeky, failed technological wonders.

It comes down to this: eBook readers are motivated by evil, and consumers see through that. These companies are trying to invent a need for a huge, low-overhead revenue stream.

Inventing a need doesn’t work. Necessity is the mother of invention, not the other way around.

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eBook Readers: just another pointless geek toy

Nov 19

Posted by Randy Hunt in Technology

In the year 2000, Stephen King drew tons of media attention when he released Riding the Bullet exclusively as an eBook. In the first 24 hours, more than 400,000 copies were sold, at $2.50 per copy. That works out quite cleanly to revenue of $1-million in one day, with no cost for printing, binding, or shipping.

From that point on, the idea of eBooks has been imagined as a hidden source of unlimited revenue — a license to print money. The question is, if the eBook revolution began nearly eight years ago, why do people keep buying printed books?

How many eBooks do you have? Maybe you got suckered into some self-help book online, or the great strategy guide for how to pick up women, or a cheat sheet for your mid-term… but these are things you can’t easily find anywhere else. How many of those 400,000 people who bought Riding the Bullet actually read it?

I’m tempted to think that people were willing to spend $2.50 for the privilege of being on the cutting edge, or maybe just trying it out and seeing if they would like it. For that matter, there are probably a good number of people who proudly claim to have everything ever written by Stephen King, and they couldn’t continue to wear that identity if they didn’t get his eBook.

So is a revolution coming?
Gadget gurus and über-nerds have all played with (or maybe even purchased) a Sony Reader, for $299, and gotten on the bandwagon. And today, Amazon announced the launch of Kindle, their new eBook reader, for $399.

Wait a second. Did you read that right? Did I really say $299, and $399? Hmmm… well, as long as books are cheap, it could still work out in the long run, right? A quick Google search for Stephen King eBooks turned up eBookMall.com, who are asking $16.99 for Cell, a book that can be had at Amazon — in hardback, no less — for $9.99, and could probably be found on the shelf at chain stores like Target or Walmart for even less.

Okay, let me get this straight. I have to pay $299 for a device that reads a file which, in spite of its lack of printing, publishing, and shipping, still actually costs more than a paperback book? Hmmm, well, there must be some advantage to reading electronically, right? What might that be?

Buying the reader, of course, means you’re not stuck in front of your computer reading a PDF. Thank God, because there is little in life that is worse, in my opinion, than sitting in front of a computer and clicking through a PDF file. But I can carry a paperback with me, so portability is still no advantage for eBooks. And the advantages for printed books don’t stop there…

I don’t have to recharge my paperback book, nor buy batteries for it, before I can read it. It goes everywhere easily, and I don’t have to put it away when I’m on an airplane. If someone bumps into me and I drop my paperback on the ground, I just pick it up and keep reading. If I drop it into a puddle of water, I may have to pay $9.99 for a new copy.

Printed books also have hidden benefits. A shelf filled with books serves as a status symbol — a social indicator of intelligence. Books can be loaned, sold, or donated, without intellectual property hounds knocking on your door. And if you happen to find yourself in a blackout in the middle of winter, books burn nicely too.

Imagine you’re just getting to the part where the killer identifies himself as the hero’s brother, and as you excitedly read along wondering if his wife is really dead or if it was all just a trick, suddenly a red light comes on and a little beep starts telling you that your battery is low. Spoiled!

If you take your eBook reader on vacation with you, you also have to take along the charger and cords. You have to turn it off for 15 minutes while the stewardess tries to convince you that some black magic in your electronic device could mess up the computers in the cockpit. If you drop it, you don’t pick it up and keep reading… you instead spend 20 minutes inspecting every inch for cracks. And if you manage to damage it, you don’t get a new one for $9.99.

A license to print money
And most insulting is, of course, the fact that eBooks are priced so high. Do these people think we don’t know the difference? There is a major printing industry being fed by the marginal costs in paperbacks that we buy for $9.99 per copy, but there is no such industry involved in the manufacture of an eBook. The author could write it and publish it himself!

If good eBooks were available for $2, the avid reader of one or two books per week might see a financial incentive to switch, but it would still take him over a year to break even on the proposition and there would have to be enough desirable titles available at that price to make it worth it to him.

Of course this avid reader with real incentive to switch would be the one who other people see and whose opinion other people trust, so getting the avid reader would get you the casual readers, gradually over time.

But there is no way on earth that it will ever work in the other direction. Gadget gurus buy every gadget that comes along, while everyone else waits to see what pans out. The nerds get their cool points and geek status for having the coolest, newest toy, but the paperback reader will continue to read paperback books.

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Where are those iPhone apps?

Nov 1

Posted by Randy Hunt in Software, Technology

I had to find this the hard way, so I’m posting the info in hopes of making it easier for others.

After you’ve done the jailbreak app, you’re probably looking at the list of apps and thinking “is this it?”

Well, it’s not. You have to add sources to the installer. Go to the section called SOURCES and add the available ones. Next time you look at the selection, there will be much more available!

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