Monthly Archives: April 2008

AirTunes Cuts Out or Drops off

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Apparently I am one of the top hits on Google when searching for a cure concerning AirTunes suddenly dropping off the face of the earth.

In the spirit of possibly helping out others who have this same problem I thought I would write up a post of my experience and complement it with links to other sites that might be helpful.

The Problem

My problem seems to be similar to most, but my situation seems to be different. I currently live in a dorm situation, meaning there are a lot of people in a relatively close location. My Airport is sitting about 7 inches away from my laptop. I always have 5 bars of AirPort connectivity. My problem is that “at random” my AirPort suddenly stops playing music and disappears from my list of available speakers.

AirTunes stops playing and won’t start up again until one of two things happens, a) I unplug my AirPort and let it “reboot” or b) wait for an unknown period of time until AirPort decides that it has speakers again.

I decided to purchase Airfoil, from Rogue Amoeba, which did nothing to solve the problem, but it does allow me to have a small little window that constantly shows me the status of my AirTunes speakers. I have looked for a pattern, and I can’t find one. It happens at different times of the day, for different lengths, at different intervals, with different programs running, etc.

People at various forums tend to say that this is caused by different phones or microwaves that are on the same or similar channel and cause interference. I have a feeling that in my case it’s probably a combination of the two, and possibly something else as well, simply because there are so many people who could possibly be calling or microwaving at any given time. (Although one would think the large amount of concrete in between rooms would help dampen things…)

Possible Solutions

I think this is a situation where there is one symptom for many problems. One person claimed to have solved the problem by turning on “multiple speakers” in iTunes. This apparently worked for a handful of people, but the comments to the tip make it clear it won’t fix everyone’s problem. And there are several other soultions suggested in the comments as well.

Macfixit suggests that turning the network to a 802.11b instead of an 802.11b/g will solve the problem. I tried this a week or so ago, and it didn’t change a thing as far as I’m concerned.

MacNN has a thread about this as well, and while it doesn’t offer much for solutions, the members do mention a few things worth looking into when trying to diagnose the problem.

Apple’s site describes the problem in their knowledge base, but their solutions don’t help me. The ones I have tried didn’t work, and the ones I didn’t try… well, they didn’t help me either. (Several of their solutions don’t apply to me, and I am not dropping my router’s security. I just don’t want to do it.)

Apple’s discussion forums is full of posts about this. One posting claims the new 802.11n no longer has this problem

The best summary in the discussions is this post by Henry B.

Dropouts or cutouts in the music stream going through an Airport Express is among the most commonly posted problems here. Sometimes the problem simply cannot be solved.

For everyone having the problem, there is a new set of variables. Even using XP and a brand new laptop, give a problem when a 5 year old laptop didn’t.

Conclusion

The more I look into this, the more I think it’s impossible to find one permanent solution. The general thinking is that this is an internal bug cause by some code, or some setting that isn’t quite right. In some cases, I think this may be true. Overall though, I think the problem comes from external sources. If someone in your neighborhood gets a new phone, it might interfere with your network. Not knowing everything your neighbor is doing a few houses away, it’s easy to attribute the problem to that new security update you downloaded a few days ago.

There’s no way of being aware of what all is going on around you and it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s going on in your machine. Many of us are probably experiencing several different problems that all result in one thing: AirTunes cutting out or dropping off.

My Current Setup

I can’t help but add in this little anecdote here at the end. It’s impractical for most people, but it’s my current solution.

I usually have iTunes running and playing music, but with iTunes and Airfoil running and playing music, my processing power is usually at 50% percent with just those two applications alone. Adding in, say, Photoshop or iMovie or another heavy program causes a huge slowdown in my system. I finally had enough, and decided to move the majority of my songs to my Windows XP box that I don’t usually use anyway. I then hooked my stereo directly to the computer and hit play. No more going through AirPort and thus, no more drop outs.

One Liners

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My Dad and I have been working on a collection of one liners for quite some time now. I just came across the collection today and decided to post it up for critique. Let me know what you think, and if you come up with some good ones, please share them and I’ll add them to the list. (Be sure to leave an alias though, so I can give you credit.)

They told me…

They said I was persuasive, but I convinced them otherwise.
They told me I was a worrywart and it really bothered me.
They said I was paranoid they are probably out to get me.
They said I was a hypochondriac and it just made me sick.
They told me I couldn’t keep a secret and I just had to tell someone.
They told me I was proud, but I’d never admit to it.
They told me I was apathetic, but I didn’t care.
They told me I was gullible and I believed them.
They told me I was smart, but I knew that already.
They said I was stupid, but I didn’t understand.
They told me I was cool, so I shivered.
They told me I was clueless, but I didn’t know what they were talking about.
They said I was indecisive; I didn’t know what to think.
They told me I was a pyromaniac and I burned with anger.
They told me I was psychic ,but I knew they would say that.
They told me I was skeptical, but I’ not so sure.
They told me I was a dupas, Duh!
They told me I was preachy, which reminds me of a story…
They told me I was pessimistic, nothing good can come from this.

I told them…

I told them I was regretful, but now I wish I hadn’t.
I told them I was wrong, but I was mistaken.
I told them I was subtle, but I don’t think they got it.

Broken Technology (Finder Search and swf files)

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Okay. I just spent the better part of two hours doing something that should have taken me 15 minutes tops.

I had a problem with Finder and I thought I could whip up a short screen cast and put it online in order to vent. I have a free screen recording program, which was getting 2 frames per second, which wasn’t enough, so I decided to try Jing, the other free program I have.

Jing worked nicely, but outputs a swf flash file, which means, no editing, and no uploading to YouTube.

So I spent a good half hour or more searching for a viable means to convert from swf to a movie file that I could edit in say, iMovie or FCP or even Window Movie Maker if need be. Anything so I can trim down the file and put it online.

I tried several programs for Mac and Windows, none of them did what I wanted and were also free. I wouldn’t mind paying for software that did this and did it well, if I knew I was going to be doing this on a regular basis. But I don’t know this, and for a one time use I don’t want to shell out $20 or $40 or $80 for the type of software I would need. Several of the pieces of software that looked promising, either didn’t perform quite as expected, or were even advertised as a “free download” but the programs themselves were not free.

Anyway, I have finally given up. I am entirely sick of technology tonight and thus I have uploaded the unedited version of my complaint to my website, and post a link here (below) for all to see. (It’s about a 6MB file, for those who are bandwidth conscious.)

If anyone has any suggestions for dealing with these type of issues in the future, drop me a line. (And yes, I know buying a decent screen recording program would solve all my issues, but I can’t justify that type of financial purchase at the moment.)

Here is the link: Finder’s Search is Broken.

A Country’s Music

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Several years ago in high school I remember hearing this phrase:

Let me control a country’s music and I will control the country.

At the time I assumed it was a quote, probably from one of the “great” dictators. But after searching all over for it for several years I could not find it. I tried different variations of quote and asked everywhere I could, nothing came up.

Until now. Reading for a class assignment I ran across the following quote in a communication theory book.

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation. – Andrew Fletcher

At long last, I have found the quote, or at least a similar and official deviant. (Which is a shame, I would have like to take credit for the first one.)

At any rate, this saying is very controversial, but also expandable. Today could we change it to say

If a man were permitted to make all the TV shows, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Or maybe not TV shows, maybe movies instead. Is this a legitimate claim? Are we shaped by media or do we shape the media?

On one hand, if we absorb what is put in front of us without a second thought, we become what we are told to become. But, as a consumer, we drive what is created. If no one watches a TV show, the company will stop producing the TV show. As a consumer body, we have control over what gets produced. The problem lies with apathy. If people don’t care what they are fed, or they don’t care what products are produced, they won’t have any say in their creation. Yet, if people do care they can make a change.

If everyone stopped eating food at McDonalds, we would collectively make McDonalds rethink their corporate strategy. But if no one cares what McDonalds does, they will have no reason to boycott. (Disclaimer: I am not anti McDonalds.)

Here is my point. Far too often the solution that is proposed is a change of policy, but often for true change to be enacted it means a change in behavior. And as the old adage goes: old habits die hard.

Finding the right todo list

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UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to something more appropriate. A future post will talk more about my general complaints with web apps.

The last week in February I went out and finally bought myself an iPod Touch. I had been wishing I had one since January 1st when a good friend showed me his. The original idea I had, although now seen as rather naive, was that I would get an iPod Touch, Apple would shortly after announce the SDK and within a week or so I could have some sweet calendar and to-do apps running on my iPod.

For over a year I have been working with a Palm Zire 31, and have been very pleased with it, but when I got my iPod, the Zire went to ebay. I was really hoping that the iPod could fully replace my Palm Pilot. Well, Apple made their announcement and it wasn’t what I expected. They told me I had to wait until June, or more likely, early to mid July, before I could use my iPod like I wanted too.

I figured I could live with this and that I would simply have to run off Web Apps until June, which wouldn’t be entirely hard because most of my time is spent on a well wireless campus. I already had a preconceived idea of how a to-do list should work and I was hoping someone had made a really wicked awesome web app that would fulfill all my needs, hopefully making things easier and more user friendly than my Palm.

I was first recommended towards Ta-da Lists, which I was really hopefully about, coming from 37 Signals. It was a neat app, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I really wanted something with due dates, so I can put every assignment for the rest of the semester into it, as well as a long list of things I want to try to accomplish in my free time. I quickly decided that Ta-da Lists was not what I was looking for and moved. (I really like the idea behind it and I love the simple to use interface, but it’s just not what I needed.)

I did some searching via Google and came across a site called, Just Another Mobile Monday, which had a list of several good applications for online to-do lists. A site called Toodledo caught my attention and seemed to have everything I needed. I like Toodledo, it did pretty much everything I wanted to do. It has priorities and allows for grouping in folders, and maintained a “Hotlist” of all tasks that were overdue or coming up soon. For anyone looking for a good to-do web app, I would put Toodledo on my list of “web apps you should try.” For some reason though, I wasn’t satisfied. I had used Toodledo for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I decided I needed to try something else, to see if it fit things better.

The next web app I decided to try out was Listingly. The interface looked neat and method of breaking things down into lists looked promising. After trying it out for a bit though, I was not very impressed with the site. The images wouldn’t always load and the text never sat right in the buttons. I played around with it for a day, but by then I knew I needed something else.

I heard Leo Laporte mention that Remember the Milk was a really good to-do list for the iPhone. I had seen it before when searching for a to-do list, so I thought I should try it out. Remember the Milk looks really promising, but unfortunately, it’s not as nice as I would like yet. After playing around on my Laptop I decided to give it a try on my iPod. I finally found the iPod optimized version of the site and discovered that it was for “pro” users. This means that there is a $25 yearly fee to use the service. Fortunately, they have a 15 day trial period for the software, and I was quickly up and running.

Remember the Milk has a very nice interface, although there are some things that take some getting use too. I have used it for 15 days now and don’t fully understand how location and tags fully work, but I really liked the rest of their set up. The little side graphics looked wonderful and they color scheme was nice too. There were a few more options in adding a task than I really needed, but it worked how I expected for the most part and worked well.

Today, however, my trial is up. Ideally, I want to use a iPod based app, rather than a web based app to store my to-do lists. Over the summer I won’t always be in a location that has wireless connection, in fact, after another year of college I can’t guarantee I’ll have wireless connection anywhere. I’m really hoping to find a great to-do list app for the iPod in June or July. One that will sync with iCalendar and everything. As much as I like Remember the Milk, I don’t feel that $25 is worth 3 months of usage, especially if $25 is suppose to give me $12. Personally, I can’t justify the spending of that money. I can work with the “non-optimized” mobile version of the site, but it really isn’t the same if you know how it could be.

Surfing the Apple website, after my trial had ended, I stumbled across Noter, a simple little to-do list on the web. It took me about 2 minutes to decide that it had no chance of serving my needs and again I needed to move on.

Which actually brings me up until now. I decided to write up my experience, and actually in the process have discovered two things. The first is that there is a site called Vitalist, which like Toodledo and Remember the Milk, look promising. The iPhone interface is free, and it appears to have a good feature set. I have signed up for an account and will probably spend the next day or two playing around with it and seeing how well it works.

The other thing I realized while writing this up was that I really did like Toodledo, and if Vitalist doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always fall back onto it for a few months until I am finally able to run apps on my iPod.

In Conclusion

There are a lot of web apps out there for staying on top of your to-do lists. I think my favorite has to be Remember the Milk, but I don’t agree with their policy of charging for an iPod interface. I understand it makes sense financially for them, but I just wish it was free.

Toodledo is probably my overall favorite because I have used it the longest, but I’m curious to see how well Vitalist works in comparison. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to post up my experience, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one.