tech.MichaelErb.net

You are here: Home / Archives for Moderator

Moderator

Review of Planet Bike Superflash Tail Light

By


When I’m cycling, I’m most concerned about traffic coming up from behind me. I want to do all I can to ensure that distracted motorists will be able to easily see me. To help make sure this happens, I always use a tail light.

One of the best tail lights I’ve found for cycling is the Planet Bike Superflash tail light. It is extremely bright and can easily be seen even in bright daylight. At dawn or dusk, it is incredibly noticeable.

Typically the light will be mounted on your seat post or attached to the back of an under-seat bag. It runs on 2-AAA batteries and battery life is excellent. I easily get a season out of one set of batteries. It’s diminutive size belies it’s amazing performance. The superflash is about $20 and available from Amazon.com

Remove Sansa Clip+ Duplicate files preceded with ._ in track listing with dot_clean terminal command

By

I’ve got several Sandisk mp3 players… Sansa Fuze, Sansa Clip and Sansa Clip+. They all exhibit a peculiar issue with track listing names. The “problem” is that there seem to be duplicate track names for all the music that I’ve added to my Sansa by dragging the tunes in from iTunes on my Mac.

I was fortunate to have an extremely helpful and knowledgable chat session with a Sandisk support person named “Apollo D.” In conjunction with that chat session and some additional Googling this issue, I have finally found a solution for this vexing problem.

Basically the “._” in front of the track listings is a result of the way that Mac OSX handles filenames. When you drag your iTunes tracks into the Sandisk player, the “duplicate” file names get created as a result of this MacOSX naming issue. What is bothersome is that you cannot delete the files directly from the player because as soon as you click on one of them, the player scans to the next “real” file and begins playing it. So you never get the chance to get to the delete menu on the player to delete the “duplicate” file name. Furthermore, these duplicates are not really music tracks anyway and don’t play. You also cannot see these files when the player is hooked up to your computer so you are not able to delete them this way either.

The solution is relatively painless and here is what you want to do to rid your Sandisk player of these files. If you must know more, then just Google…there are many places that discuss the “dot_clean” terminal command.

1. Make sure that the System Settings > USB mode on your player is set to MSC.
2. Hook your Sandisk player up to your computer via USB.
3. Launch the Mac OS terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal.)
4. At the prompt, type in the command:dot_clean
5. Hit the space bar one time to insert a space after dot_clean
6. Locate the icon of your Sandisk player on your desktop and drag the icon of the player into your terminal window. This will copy the path of your Sandisk player into the terminal window.
7. HIt Return
8. That’s all there is to it. You terminal window should have returned you to a new line after completing the command you just issued.
9. Unmount your Sandisk player.

Now after the player refreshes itself after it has been disconnected from your computer, you will notice that all the “duplicate” tracks have been removed.

If you add new tunes to your player after doing this the first time, you will have to follow this procedure again to rid the newly added files of the ._ track names.

iThemes “on making money” and being there for you “when you need help, support”

By

I posted a while ago about what I felt was a disturbing trend in pricing that some of the companies that sell “premium” WordPress plugins were moving towards. I won’t repeat myself as the post is available here.

In the wake of that original post, some feathers were ruffled. I will admit that I was challenged by the frenzy of comments to take a fresh look at my viewpoint. The result is that I have tempered my views somewhat. There are some “premium” plugins that are way more complex than I alluded to in my post. An example of such a plugin would be Gravity Forms. Definitely a notch or two above others in terms of coding complexity and support offered.

However, I still believe the model of pricing based on annual renewal fees sucks. And if you are not a developer by occupation, yet still run a few sites and purchase a few “premium” plugins, you will quickly be running up a costly to maintain annual subscription model to support your “premium” plugins.

In any case, I was mildly amused when I became aware of a relatively recent video published by Cory from iThemes in which he was making the justification for his company charging for their products. You can view the entire video, but below the video in this post is the pertinent portion of what he had to say…

“…our true ideal customers will come back and say “no no no, we want you to charge us money for this because we want you to be in business. We want you to be in business a year from now, five years from now, when we come back for updates or need more help, support, all that kind of stuff.” … and trust me, as our true clients, you want us to make money cause you want us to be here and I’ll say this one warning to those few that are lookin’ at different other companies and everything… I like to talk mostly about us but I’ll just say this one warning ,is that you really need to look at those, where you invest that money to make sure those people have a long term sustainable business model wrapped around those products because in a year, six months from now if they vanish off the face of the earth…. you wanna know that they’re going to be there for you when you need help. And so that’s why I’m confident, that’s why I share this about pricing, about getting paid and all that kind of stuff.”

Sounds like what Cory is trying to say is that when you buy something from them (iThemes), that they are “going to be there for you when you need help.” So it would stand to reason that if you bought something in late November 2008 and that if you had a problem with it scarcely 5 months later, you’d eagerly get the support you needed from iThemes, right? I mean afterall, they charge money and all that good stuff to be there for you when you need help and support. That’s what he said, right?

Well, let’s investigate that statement a little bit. In November 2008, I bought the 2009 Theme Club membership from iThemes. It was not inexpensive. As the months went by, I found that several of the themes that were part of that slowly growing bundle of themes contained bugs and in some cases had features that did not work. Seemed I was frequently visiting the forums to report the bugs I had found.

Specifically, the theme BizCard was coded to have an address field that could be filled in from the Dashboard. It had several fields; Street 1, Street 2, City, State, Zip, Phone number and email address. The problem was that due to an error in the coding of the theme, the Address 2 field did not work correctly. I posted this issue in the forums several times and got no reply from iThemes. When I emailed iThemes for support, I received no solution or fix. I then made a Tweet about my experience and Cory replied to me in this way… (keep in mind, this is from the guy who has just told you that iThemes is “going to be there for you when you need help”)…

Here is what Cory told me in his reply…

michael, i always appreciate your input – but seriously?! we’re not even actively selling it – think we might have more pertinent issues?

What could be more pertinent than supporting a buggy theme that your company developed?

So do you get the support you pay for with iThemes? I sure didn’t. Good luck with that.