Amazon shuts down Special Occasion Reminder, adding birthday to address app in OSX

I received an email from Amazon at 3 am EST this morning telling me that they are shutting down the Special Occasion Reminder service. They are converting these reminders to their (new?) Friends & Family Gifting service. I understand that they are trying to encourage people to buy things from Amazon for these birthdays as gifts, but do they have to externally rename the service? If you have been a long time Amazon customer like myself, some of the very old reminder setup did not have a marker to say that the reminder is for a birthday. Those older reminders will not be converted.

What to do? I can add those reminders back to the new service, or I can add the birthdays to my address book database on my Mac. I updated my address book on the Mac. This is how:

Adding Birthday field to the Address book app on the Mac

1. Go to the Preferences menu
2. Click on the Templates button
3. Click Add Field and select Birthday
4. Voila ! Each contact in the address book now has a birthday field

Aperture stopped importing photo from Photostream

Did you find that suddenly Aperture stopped automatically import photos from your photostream? This is a bug in Aperture, as of version 3.3.1 I found. If you have more than 1000 photos in the Photostream imported into Aperture, Aperture will stopped importing any new photos.

One more time: Aperture misunderstood the 1000 photo limits that Apple is suppose to have for Photostream. The correct way for this to work is that Apple will discard older photos and keep the most recent 1000 photos in the stream. But Aperture instead stopped importing after 1000.

Solution:

1. Go to the photostream meta project on the side menu/explorer
2. (Assuming you have already imported the older photostream pictures) select the older photos and delete them “from photostream” using either command-delete or right mouse click then select “delete from photostream”.
3. Then newer photos will automatically start being imported again.

Photo Stream “Album”:

See Count at bottom:

Itunes Music Match Resource Usage

My main  music library is on my 2011 Mac Mini, 2.3GHz 8G ram Core i5 CPU. Right now it is half way matching my 9000+ songs. Looking at the activity monitor, it is using up one entire CPU, with 35 threads and about 500 Meg of real memory. I assume the matching process is some sort of checksum computation and then a network query, which is why it is CPU intensive but not network intensive.

Memorializing 11/11/11 using Apple Products

At 10:59 this morning my kids decided they want to do something special at 11:11:11 11/11/11. 12 minutes later a non cropped version of this picture showed up on our facebook wall. How do I do it?

1. Find a free clock app for the iPad and install it
2. switch on our Apple TV feeding into our main TV
3. run the Clock app and turn on AirPlay Mirroring
4. get the kids positioned
5. take a few pictures using the iPhone4S
6. Once we have the right picture,
7. go to the iPad photo stream which has already pulled down the picture from the iPhone
8. do a quick crop and enhancement (our loft is too sunny and it messes up the contrast)
9. run the Facebook app on the iPad to post the picture

All in 12 minutes. Thank you Steve!

iPhone Day Light Savings Bug strikes again November 2011

If you have your phone’s date and time settings set to “automatic”, meaning it will automatically determine your time zone, you would be one hour early to your appointments today! For some reason, if you set your timezone yourself then the phone gets the day light savings change correctly. See the two screenshots I took flipping the automatic switch back and forth.

iPhone 4s preordered

iPhone 4s preordered, a photo by pkshiu on Flickr.

In honor of Steve Jobs.

Mac Bluetooth wireless keyboard tips and tricks

Volume keys do not work

The top of the bluetooth keyboard has all the special keys to control volumne, play/pause etc. I was so disapponted that they do not work! They invoke the normal function key functions instead, running spaces etc. Then I remembered. I most likely have to install the latest keyboard driver. Click on the Apple menu, software update, downloaded the new driver, and all is well. This happened when I added the magic mouse as well. So, remember to run software update after adding new hardware.

Changing the Caps Lock Key to Control

This is for the hardcore programming using emacs. We live by the control key. Almost all modern keyboard move the control key to somewhere horrible. Well, OS X (bless Apple) actually have a system wide setting that let you change the pretty much useless Caps Lock key into Control .Just go to System Preferences, Keyboard, Keyboard Tab, modifier keys and change the mapping for the “Caps Lock” key to “Control”. Your hands will thank you.

Day 3: iPad at BarCampBoston

Lots of iPads at BarCampBoston, just not mine! I wanted to test it out as a note taking device. But I also have to give a talk about teaching 6 years old to program, and Scratch does not work on the iPad. So I had to bring my Macbook Pro instead.

People were using the iPad, first and second generations, as note taking devices. At least one speaker was using it as notes for his talk, but at least in sessions that I attended, no one is using video out from it to give a presentation directly. I certainly think that is very doable. In fact I am looking forward to trying it out in small meetings myself.

So I had a fun and productive day learning things from solution marketing, to accelerometer driven music performances, to BBQ. (BBQ is not grilling, just FYI). But not much iPad time today for me.

My iLive is now complete, iPad day 1

My iPad finally arrived. I think the FedEx guy knows it is an iPad. Even him sounded happy. First thoughts:

Problem that I didn’t think I will have — OMG! How am I going to organize all the apps? It took 20 minutes for the first sync. It brought over ALL my apps. I am still going through cycles of removing apps that are not suitable for the iPad, while are useful for the iPhone. Then reorganizing where apps should go.

Do you notice the little virtual marks on the F and J keys on the virtual keyboard? It will have something to do with their new haptic patents?

Typing on the virtual keyboard is harder than I thought. It is too narrow, and I have small hands. Yes I am typing this on the iPad.

I went to the apple store trying to buy a protective case but they do not have any third party cases in store yet. “we only have the smart cover” conspiracy to get you to buy their cover? You decide.

Final gotcha of the day – the iPad cannot be charged by the USB port on my powered USB hub. I have to separately plug in the included 10watt charger to charge it.

How to Find a iPad 2 using Python

I did not buy the version 1 iPad because an iPad without a front facing camera just does not seem right. At iPad 2 launch day, I was going to go stand in line (as I did for my iPhone 3GS) for one, as my office is about a mile away from the Boston Apple Store. However real work got in the way.

I did not anticipate the demand for this thing. I guess a lot of people were like me, skipping the iPad 1 and waited for the iPad 2. I did place an order order days after, which is of course too late.

Python to the rescue! Someone posted the links to check for stock on the Target mobile site. I threw together a quick python script, using BeautifulSoup (Don’t you love BeautifulSoup ?) to scrape the site. Saturday night, I found a 32G black iPad 2 available in a Target close by ! I drove over almost first thing Sunday morning, only to find that the two that they had in stock was already purchased by someone who got there, waited for the store to open, at 8am.

Lesson here? Programming is easy. Actually getting up in the morning and driving over to wait in line is, well, a bit overkill. I think I will just wait for the online shipment.

Meanwhile, you can try out the python program here. Rename to .py for running.