Latest Posts in Mac Mania

Still cruising slowly home

Editor’s Note: Turns out Christopher Breen’s return from MacMania isn’t done yet.

Wichita, Kansas —If one were to measure a successful trip by the amount of time versus dollars spent, my trip home from the recent MacMania cruise is a grand success.

When last we met, I was lost in a vengeful fantasy—planning how I would serve Alitalia representatives Paulo-of-the-white-Eurotrash-glasses and Blameless Marco for turning what should have been a long day of travel into a days long endurance contest. Little did I know when I filed the story that there would be more to tell. It’s like this:

If Alitalia had honored my confirmed ticket from Rome to Cincinnati, I wouldn’t have had to tell the Blameless Marco that I would do anything to get out of Rome on Monday.

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Notes from the boat

Editor’s Note: As the latest MacMania cruise heads into its home stretch, Senior Editor Christopher Breen continues to file reports from ms Noordam.

The MacMania 4.5 cruise is winding its way back to Civitavecchia, Italy, the port city about an hour outside of Rome where we first boarded the ms Noordam. Since we set sail a little over a week ago we’ve visited Monte Carlo, Monaco; Livorno (the port city that acts as the gateway to Florence and Pisa); Barcelona, Spain; Mallorca, Spain; Carthage, Tunisia; and Palermo, Sicily. Tomorrow I plan to dip my well-fed self in the waters surrounding the isle of Capri while many of my other shipmates explore Naples and Pompeii.

But forget the exotic locations. What’s interested the sea-going geeks were David Pogue’s iPhoto and Tiger sessions, Sal Soghoian’s AppleScript and Automator talks (and the cool way he found to allow students in class to surf an Automator Web site without having to be connected to the Internet), Janet Hill’s iLife and Software Extravaganza sessions, Jack Davis’ Photoshop classes, Bill Durrence’s photo expeditions and photo critique get-togethers, and, okay, maybe even my talks about iLife, Apple’s Information hub, iTunes, and the iPod. Luxury learning at its finest.

The point of today’s blog isn't so much to instill envy but to clear my brain of the not-really-worthy-of-a-blog-on-their own items that collect on a cruise like this. These include:

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A stitch in time

Editor’s Note: Senior Editor Christopher Breen continues his report from the MacMania 4.5 cruise.

Somewhere in the Mediterranean —I admit it, when preparing for the MacMania cruise I was in a bit of a rush—wrapping up my stateside work and prepping my presentations for the cruise. As such I didn’t pack my PowerBook as completely as I might have. Specifically, I neglected to include the photo-stitching tool for my camera. Given the number of panoramic views I’ve encountered on our voyage, this was a big mistake.

But, by Neptune’s beard, I’m on a Geek Cruise and if I can’t find a way to fake it with the tools provided by Apple, I deserve to be set adrift.

After some experimentation, I managed to stitch together a series of images from my Canon PowerShot S3IS. Granted, they’re not as beautifully stitched as they would be with a tool designed for that purpose (or with a copy of Photoshop), but for a quick and dirty stitch, they’re not bad. Here’s how I did it.

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Life is Beautiful

Editor’s Note: Senior Editor Christopher Breen is on board the MacMania 4.5 cruise and will be checking in from the ship during his 10-day voyage.

Somewhere in the Mediterranean —On this, my third MacMania Geek Cruise, I travel without the companionship (and, OK, the added expense) of my loving family. I’m sorry that they’re not here with me not only because we’re a chummy clan who enjoy each others’ company, but because my daughter has missed the opportunity to meet one of her heroes.

This is a hero she (or, perhaps, even you) wouldn’t recognize by name, but if you’re a longtime Mac user who’s had children in the past 10 years, you’re more than a little familiar with his work. I’m speaking of Geek Cruiser Craig Hickman, the inventor of the original Kid Pix.

I had no idea this soft-spoken Oregonian would be aboard and I was floored when I was introduced to him. As any computer-using parent knows, Kid Pix isn’t just for kids. Before I had a child, I was a fan of this frolicsome art and design program and there are still times when my daughter has to wrest the mouse away from me when we’re playing with Software MacKiev’s version of the program. (Although Hickman designed the original Kid Pix, he’s had no input on recent versions.)

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Roamin' the ocean

Editor’s Note: The MacMania 4.5 cruise is underway, with Christopher Breen checking in from the ship with his third MacMania dispatch.

Somewhere in the Western Mediterranean —Just hours ago, Holland America’s newest vessel, the ms Noordam, put to sea with a passel of passengers (including a respectable complement of Mac geeks and photo enthusiasts). Participating in my third Geek Cruise, it took little time for me to fall into the pattern of shipboard luxury living—eat, drink, sniff in the ocean air, and geek-out with the passengers and other instructors.

This is made all the easier by the fact that each of Holland America’s “dam” boats is laid out in exactly the same ways. The buffet can always be found on the 9th (Lido) deck. The aft areas of the second and third decks host the Vista dining rooms where we tuck into sumptuous meals after a long day talking tech. And you’ll find the same two pools—one indoors and the other out. The Ocean bar invariably appears mid-ship on the 3rd deck and the Internet Cafe…

Wait a sec, the Internet Cafe is no longer the Internet Cafe. It’s now the Explorations Cafe. Not only does it bear a different name, but the erstwhile IC has a different look.

While the Cafes on the other ships were roomy enough and offered the same variety of satellite-based broadband we have here, the Explorations Cafe is huge: there are more than a dozen leather-clad lounge chairs, multiple computer stations (all Windows-based, unfortunately), a video wall made up of four synchronized plasma displays, a coffee bar at the aft end, and—most interesting to me—tables adorned with personal music listening stations.

That’s right, if you’ve failed to bring your iPod you can punch up a selection of music chosen from a library of more than 1,000 tracks. Just choose a genre, artist, or album (or all three if you want to get very specific), and in no time you’re listening to your favorite music through a set of headphones tethered to the station. As the picture below attests, the interface can’t touch the iPod’s elegance, but for a desk-bound music solution, it’s no worse than any other 21st century jukebox.

The existence of these music stations and the fact that Holland America determined that the only change it would make to the design of a new ship was to expand the size and scope of the Internet Cafe tells you something. While the geek-leaning passengers may remain in the minority, it’s clear that their influence is being felt in high places. Now if only we could get wireless in our staterooms…

My iPod needs culture

Editor’s Note: Christopher Breen’s European adventure—courtesy of MacMania 4.5 —continues on the streets of Rome. In Blog Due , Chris checks in from the Sistine Chapel.

As you may recall, I was the worst sort of tourist Tuesday —unlearned in the customs of the local population and slightly vexed that this same population couldn’t see its way clear to do things The American Way and drip down free broadband from the heavens.

Now that I’ve worked through the majority of my connectivity issues (as well as ordered three complete meals without once pointing and grunting) I am The Man Who, Fully Versed in the Way Things Are, Has a Small Suggestion to Make.

(This is a recognizable pattern, harkening back to the day when Ogg, a cave-dweller newly arrived from the far side of the tar pits counseled Igg, the local transportation authority, “Square wheels, my dear man. Square like your head. Far sturdier and less likely to run away with you than that silly round object you’re hewing.”)

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The accidental tourist

Editor’s Note: It’s MacMania time again—the event that combines seminars on Photoshop, Tiger, and the iPod, with an ocean cruise. This time around, MacMania sets sail for 10 days in the Mediterranean Sea, and Senior Editor Christopher Breen is our man aboard the ms Noordam. In Blog Uno , Chris checks in from Italy a few days before MacMania 4.5 commences.

Rome, Italy —When traveling abroad I do my best to dent the notion of the Ugly American. I speak slowly and softly, slacken my pace, and learn enough of the language to say “Hello, Goodbye, Please, Thank you, Pardon me, How much, and My, that [beer, wine, local firewater] was tasty, may I have another please?” That doesn’t mean, however, that I’m incapable of playing the Stupid Tourist—the visitor so steeped in the customs of his homeland that all expectations of his current surroundings are wildly off the mark.

Take, for example, my assumption that because you can’t spit in an American city without wetting a wireless hotspot, broadband is as ubiquitous as water in other parts of the globe.

Well, no. In the land of real cappuccino, the Internet coffee shop is as rare as Starbucks.

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MacMania photo gallery: Headed to Mazatlan

Click on thumbnail to open the full image and caption.

[ Photos by Derrick Story .]

Photo Gallery - Mac Mania 4 - Gallery 2

Nuts to you

As the subject hasn’t yet come up in the MacMania IV blog entries Jason Snell and I have proffered over the past couple of days, I thought it worth mentioning that while the geeks aboard this Geek Cruise are thrilled to be talking tech with the likes of me, Jason, Bob LeVitus, Andy Ihnatko, Leo Laporte, Woz, and Apple’s Sal Soghoian and Janet Hill, the other passengers aboard the ms Oosterdam have a different impression of our passion.

They think we’re nuts.

After a long day of excursions (the estuary-birding/hayless hay-ride photo-god Ben Long, Jason, Sal and his wife Naomi and I took part in during our stop in Mazatlan was particularly time-stretching) the “normal” passengers are ready for a night of merry making—taking in a show, dancing, gambling, or strolling the deck in the temperate Mexican moonlight.

The geeks? We’re clustered outside the ship’s Internet Center, banging away on our PowerBooks and iBooks during impromptu brain dumps between geeks, faculty, and those passersby who, brave enough to approach those so apparently out of touch with reality, are curious to know what could be so enticing to drag us away from the many, less-cerebral onboard pleasures.

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Mailing it in

Those who follow the chronicles of MacMania cruises such as the one taking place in the watery regions west of Mexico know that the satellite Internet access on the ship is expensive and not always reliable. With that in mind, those of us for which a constant connection to the Web is as vital as oxygen have developed strategies for getting what we need from the Internet even over the hinkiest of connections.

This takes the form of tailoring e-mail accounts to grab mail from specific accounts only—my Macworld account but not my .Mac account, for example. Or configuring a newsreader to pull in only the latest five headlines from a Top 10 list of sites.

But as the Translator widget tells me: Los mejores planes puestos de ratones y de hombres van a menudo mal . All it took was one corrupt email message from a bandmate to bring the whole works to a crashing halt.

Specifically, Entourage choked on the final two kilobits of a five kilobit message from my band’s trumpet player and the 16 messages queued behind it refused to budge until I dealt with that 5Kb’s worth of “Are we rehearsing tonight?”

Regrettably, that account has no webmail counterpart so I couldn’t kill it with a browser. And Entourage won’t allow you to partially download messages under 5Kb.

So, what to do?

Switch e-mail clients.

The in-case-of-emergency FireWire drive I carry includes copies of most major Mac e-mail clients for situations just like this. If any of those clients was likely to allow a lower partial download limit, it was Bare Bones Software’s Mailsmith. Sure enough, even in Demo mode (which allows you to use the program limit-free for 30 days), I could create a POP account (Window: Accounts) and set the Don’t Download Mail Larger Than X K to any value I wanted.

I did just that, grabbed the first couple of Kb of the errant message with Mailsmith, wiped it off the server, and was back to cruising.