NB! MOVED TO NEW SITE: JMTee's Journal

I finally decided to take the plunge and move my blog from Blogger to .Mac/iWeb. With the latest update to iWeb software the remaining hinders were erased: iWeb received proper comments and the update speed was improved. Also, I've always wanted to use more photos and pics on my site, and with iWeb it is a simple drag and drop operation. So, please update your bookmarks to point to the new address at JMTee's Journal.

More iPod users in Stockholm?

I've been on a business trip in Stockholm today and I'm now waiting at Arlanda airport my home flight back to Tampere.

I arrived early in the morning and had a nice 20-minute walk to my meeting through Kungsholmen which was waking up to a new day. What I noticed was, that a lot of people were using some sort of earbuds - maybe half of them being white ;-) Maybe it is just the fact that there are more people in Stockholm than in Tampere, but I got the impression that there were more people using portable players than back home. Well, just thought that I pass on this relevant information... OK, got to go to gate now.

Hipster PDA + Wallet

See my solution for Hipster PDA + wallet combination here.

Betalogue: Mighty Mouse: I guess I am hooked

My sentiments exactly. I have ment to blog about the Mighty Mouse, which I've found out to be really great. I've noticed that many people, for example some at our office, have dismissed it off hand without even really trying it. But don't take only my word for it, go and read this review at the Betalogue.

Sherlock Holmes on my iPod

Like so many people, Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has always intrigued me. I remember reading The Hound of the Baskervilles when I was a kid. Also, I recall seeing some of the old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce films on TV years back. From that time on, Basil Rathbone has been the Sherlock Holmes for me. Jeremy Brent as the TV series Holmes has come close, but Rathbone remains number one.

Lately I've been going through the complete canon of Holmes stories for the first time. I haven't been reading them, however, instead I've been listening to them on my iPod. Couple of years back the English MacFormat magazine had a complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories included on the cover CD. You can also get lots of free Sherlock Holmes audio material from the Net. See, also A Study in Sherlock weblog for Holmes related stuff and info.

3000 Miles to Graceland

OK, the film's just started and I've already lost track on how many people have been shot dead. And I've seen my cousin's husband who has a small role in the film, so I think I can switch off the TV and go to bed... not my kinda movie.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Even though I’ve had the DVD for a long time, I had not watched this, Hayao Miyazaki’s first film before tonight. And of course it was as great as all the other Miyazaki films. I watched it with original Japanese audio, witch is the way I prefer it – with English subtitles, naturally. Yesterday I and my youngest son watched the newest film, Howl’s Moving Castle, but it was dubbed in Finnish. Even if the Finnish dubbing was well done, I still have to watch the film anew soon with the original voices. It’s just the only ‘right’ way for me.

.Mac Syncing not Working

Apparently the syncing has been lost for several days now. I was wondering what was the matter when .Mac side informed that it was syncing for the first time(!) I tried several trouble-shooting options before resorting to forums. I could have save a lot of time had I checked the forums right away.

Fictional Countries in Tintin Comics

There was a brief list about fictional countries in literature, films and especially in comics in today’s Aamulehti newspaper. The list included among other comics related countries Borduria from the Tintin stories – but no Syldavia, the neighbouring country, not even if in the accompanying illustration Tintin was running with the sceptre of king Ottokar of Syldavia. And what about other fictional countries in the Tintin stories? There was no mention of Central American countries of San Theodor and Nuevo Rico? And no Arab country of Khemed? What ever happened to investigative journalism?

Testing iWeb and .Mac as Blogging Solution

I've been playing around with the iWeb program and I've been seriously considering moving my blog over to .Mac. The limitations of the iWeb – missing commenting, for example – can be overcome, but that means some tweaking and I'm not sure I want to do that on a regular basis. On the other hand, iWeb integrates seamlessly with other iLife software, so adding pictures, for example, couldn't be easier; it's much easier than with Blogger. We'll I'll have to see. In the mean time, you can have a look at my test blog at the address web.mac.com/jmt

My 'Sync Chart'

I have been using Mac OS X's .Mac synchronising services almost as long as they have been available. Getting a new Mac or mobile phone has never been a problem when it has come to transfering calendar or contact data to new decices; I've let synchronising take care of that. My biggest problem, though, has been the fact that I've not been able to sync my work calendar with my mobile phone. I tried to do with Apple Scripts but that was too cumbersome. But now, finally, with the latest update to Entourage, it is possible. In order to better illustrate the setup, I made the below 'sync chart'. And it really works ;-)

How to Import Archived Mail Back into Mail.app in Tiger

I don't quite believe this... For a long time I have taken backups of important mail in Mail.app by first archiving them in a folder in the Mail.app left panel and then just dragging them to the Desktop. This way I've had an mbox file which I could burn to CD or import back to Mail at will. Or so I thought...

When I today tried to import some of my archived mail from an mbox file I noticed that I simply couldn't do it. I could open individual emails from within the mbox file, but could not import all of them back to the Mail.app. At this point I turned to the Internet and found this explanation on a small developer site:

'In Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger", the default message format for Mail messages changed from the Apple custom mbox-package format to the new emlx format (where messages are stored in individual files for Spotlight indexing). However, if you need to recover from a hard drive crash, it's almost impossible to recover your mail messages easily since Mail won't import emlx files and you can't add them to your mailboxes any other way.'

So, in order to get Spotlight working, Apple decided to lose easy mail archiving. Note, that there is no way of exporting or saving mail from the Mail.app – at least I don't know about it.

Luckily the same site that offered the explanation also provided a solution in the form of a small program which converts the new format back into standard mbox format which then can be imported back into Mail. Brilliant. If you need the app, you can get it here.

But really, Apple should've done this, or at least they should have provided an other way to export and import your mails. Not good, Apple.

Burnt MacBook Pro Power Connector

This doesn't look good. Hope it's an isolated issue.

Startup Times

All right, the MacBook Pro 2.0 GHz has been up and running for couple of days now. Over all it is definitely faster when it comes to Intel-optimised software. Also, the user interface is clearly more responsive than with my old PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz.

One of the impressive things is the shorter startup time, which has been reported by many people on the Net, and which I can corroborate. It is roughly half the time of G4 1.33. Below find a graph indicating an average of three consecutive startups and the time in seconds it took to reach the login window. The averages were 28.3 and 56.1 seconds for MBP and PB respectively.


Note that after an extensive use or updates the boot time can be much longer, but the same trend of MacBook Pro taking approximately only half the time continued there also.

Anyway, the real test for me is the speed of MS Office products, more of which I'll post next week after I get to use them in real environment at work.

MacBook Pro

Finally my long awaited MacBook Pro arrived. It's the 15" 2.0GHz model. I will be installing it tonight. I think I'll use the Migration Assistant for the first time ever. I've always done clean installation before, but it will take time to get everything set up correctly, so migrating my data and settings from the old laptop is a tempting option. We'll see...

No More Fat Moomins

Apart from our Mac-using bishop, an other great thing in last Sunday's Aamulehti newspaper was that finally our Moomin strip series is reprinted in correct proportions. Wohoo! So far it has always been squeezed vertically to better fit into the reserved space, but now the Moomin 'Sunday page' is three normal strips on top of each other. This change is due to Aamulehti incorporating two small tabloid sized parts called Ihmiset (People) and Asiat (Matters) with the Sunday paper; this has given more room for comics, crosswords, Sudokus and stuff.

The only sad thing is that the Moomin series is nearing its end, but I guess it was better late than never. So, thanks anyway, Aamulehti!

The Flying Bishop of Tampere

Today's local newspaper, Aamulehti, has a story about the bishop of Tampere, Juha Pihkala, who apparently is a Mac user and a keen virtual pilot(!) The bishop doesn't want to shoot other planes, though, which is probably a good thing considering his occupation; instead he uses realistic flight simulation software X-Plane with pedals and stuff. Way to go, bishop!