A few weeks back I bought myself a Sony PS3 Bluetooth remote control for my PS3. For those wondering what this is, the PS3 is not just a games machine, it is also a media centre. In particular it is a great upscaling DVD player, and a brilliant Blu-ray player. However, unlike your usual DVD player, it doesn’t come with a remote.

Without a remote you can still control the PS3′s media centre, but it isn’t that comfortable. You need to use a game controller, so there isn’t your usual reverse/fast forward/play/pause layout.

Now the PS3 doesn’t have an Infrared sensor, but it does have bluetooth. So Sony have used bluetooth for the remote. This has the advantage that you don’t need to point the controller at the PS3 to control it. And the disadvantage that Infrared based universal controllers won’t work with the PS3 (and it chews up batteries a bit).

There have been plenty of complaints on the net about the lack of IR. Personally I’m not fussed – I was always surprised Apple didn’t use Bluetooth for remote control on their Macs and instead went with IR – usually Apple go for the latest technologies. And using new technologies gives companies an opportunity to release better universal remotes – no one yet has come out with an IR/Bluetooth universal remote.

So, the PS3 remote. Yes, it makes a huge difference for me when watching movies. It works well. And if you are still reading this, and you’ve read my blog before, you’d know there is a massive whinge coming.

The remote has 3 big problems as I see it:

1. No backlight/glow-in-the-dark buttons
2. Any button switches the PS3 on
3. No off button

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

The buttons

First, no backlight or glow-in-the-dark buttons. The remote is basically for media centre control. You use it for watching movies. And usually you watch movies either in the dark or in low light conditions. So what genius designs a remote that is totally black so you can’t see what buttons you are pushing in a dark room?

I mean, how much more would it have cost to add some glow in the dark buttons or a backlight button? The remote wasn’t cheap (AU$49).

Turning on the PS3

Any button you press turns on the PS3.

Now, when you first think about this this might sound fine. Press play – PS3 comes on. What’s wrong with that? I mean, the remote on my TV turns on the TV if I press a button.  Why not the PS3?

Well, if you own a PS3 you’ll know exactly why this isn’t good. Because a PS3 isn’t an instant on device like a TV generally is. It takes a little while to boot up. And then you need to take some action to do something, like choose music or a game, or a movie to watch off the hard drive. So ideally, you don’t want the PS3 booting up when you accidently touch a button while picking up the remote.

But the main problem with this feature is because of problem number 3.

Turning off the PS3

There is no button to turn off the PS3.

Well, that isn’t totally correct. There is a button. In the centre of the remote is a “PlayStation” button. Pressing and holding that button for a couple of seconds brings up a dialog asking if you want to turn off the PS3. If you choose yes (via Enter or X), it then asks are you sure and you must once again respond with Enter or X.

So, say you are watching TV. You accidently touch a button on the PS3 remote (I’ve done it before). The PS3 boots up. At this point, you need to stop watching TV, so you can switch over to the PS3, wait for it to boot, then hold down the PS button, wait for it to ask if you want to turn the PS3 off, hit Enter or X, then when asked if you are sure, hit Enter or X, then go back to watching TV.

OR you have to keep watching TV, wait a minute for the PS3 to boot (lights on it show disk activity, so you wait for the disk activity to stop), press and hold the PS button for a couple of seconds, hope that you held it long enough, and press Enter followed by Enter, and wait to see if you did that right (blindly) and the PS3 shuts down.

It’s just stupid. Why not have just one button (the PS button perhaps) turn on the PS3, and that same button, when held for a second or more, turn off the PS3. Or have a dedicated on/off button?

There are other minor issues – like the fact that the controllers are rechargeable via a USB cable to the PS3, while the remote requires AA batteries. Yes, the controllers cost twice the price, but then they also have rechargeable via USB batteries, a vibrating function for games, analogue sticks, motion sensors and LED indicators. The remote has basic push buttons (more of them of course), and nothing more.

I would have paid a little more for some glow in the dark buttons and a dedicated on/off button. I’m sure it wouldn’t have cost much more to add those. Rechargeable batteries built-in like the controllers would have also been nice and would make it feel like an integrated solution rather than a cheap add-on.

I’m assuming that the on/off issue can’t be fixed with an update to the firmware, since the remote has been out for quite some time and nothing has come through from Sony. In the end though, the remote is good. Just not great. I find I treat it with kid gloves – not because I’m scared I’ll break it, just that I’m scared I’ll turn the PS3 on accidently while I’m cleaning or something and have to go through the pain of turning the damn thing off.

This post may be useful to anyone using SMB to share files to Windows users, but is particularly important to Leopard Server users because of the way OS X uses hidden files in the file system.

In the office we have a Mac Pro running Leopard Server. This machine acts as (amongst other things) a file server, providing a common area for sharing files (that are backed up as I’ve discussed previously).

OS X users can access the server using AFP or SMB, and Windows users use SMB. I was whinging to a colleague that Windows keeps leaving these files around that we can see when sharing the drive – those files being:

• Thumbs.db
• ~$* files
• *.tmp files
• Rescued Document* files

He pointed out that that was nothing compared to the sheer number of files Apple’s AFP and OS X leaves behind:

• .DS_Store
• .localized
• .AppleDouble folders
• ._* files
• .TemporaryItems

That’s a whole lot of dot files that OS X users never see because dot files by default are hidden from the user (as they are in any Unix/Linux implementation). However, Windows doesn’t use that convention.

I logged in via Windows and he was right – the file system was a mess. I felt sorry for the Windows users (more than I usually do just because they are Windows users).

So, anyway, to cut a long story short, here’s the fix. On Leopard Server, edit the file /etc/smb.conf from a Terminal window – something like:

sudo vi /etc/smb.conf

Add the following two lines to the [global] section of the file, and save the file:

veto files = /.*/Thumbs.db/
delete veto files = yes

From the Server Admin application, restart SMB.

Now, anyone connected via SMB to the shared file system will no longer see the dot files or the Thumbs.db files.

This doesn’t fix the issue with Microsoft Office leaving ~$* files everywhere, or Windows *.tmp files. You could hide them by adding them to the veto file list, but you probably don’t want to just hide the files as they are quite large. I’m thinking I might write a script that automatically removes these files once they are older than a few days, to try and keep things clean. If you have such a script, then you could hide the other files too.

Back in late 2007 I wrote an article comparing Excel functions with Apple’s Numbers ’08 - Apple’s then new spreadsheet application that was part of iWork ’08.

This week Apple released iWork ’09, which contains Numbers ’09. For completeness I thought I should do the same comparison again, to see how Numbers now stacks up.

The Numbers

Here is a link to the spreadsheet in Numbers ’09 format (zipped), and a PDF Version.

And here is a summary table:

As you can see, things have improved a lot in terms of coverage of Excel functionality. In particular, there are big increases in Statistics and Engineering functions. Almost 100 new functions were added in the new release.

What does that mean for those coming from Excel, or trying to import Excel spreadsheets? Well, Apple seem to have covered most of the common functionality. The numbers above are misleading, and look like Apple haven’t – but when you take, as an example, Engineering functions, you find that most of the missing functionality is around complex numbers. I doubt anyone reading this blog has a spreadsheet that does complex number calculations. Similarly database functions – their use is pretty obscure.

There are possibly some stats and finance functions that will break Excel import, so if you rely heavily on these you should check the list.

So, as I mentioned, that is a big increase in functions. Still, I’m disappointed Apple didn’t try and match Excels functions totally (maybe not Database Functions), and then start to add some of their own. The compatibility argument would have been a lot strong if they had, and some of the functions would have been pretty easy to add (ISNUMBER anyone?)

So is Numbers any good?

Yes. I use it daily, and it is much easier to use than Excel, the results look better, and it has some great functionality such as table categories and intelligent tables – in comparison Excel is just a big boring grid with some functions behind cells.

Being able to put small individual tables on a single page is the real advantage of Numbers, and the end results are spreadsheets that actually look great, communicate better and are easier to manipulate. Numbers is a pleasure to use for the most part.

You can export to Excel format, though it is always disappointing as Excel spreadsheets are so damn ugly. The iPhone also can view Numbers documents (as it can Excel). If you are on Windows of course, you can’t view Numbers documents. But who actually chooses to use Windows these days?!

A week or so ago I was recording Tin Man on Channel 7 here in Australia. I have no idea if the show is any good – I haven’t watched it yet.  But I love a good “re-imagining”.

Anyway, I recorded both episodes on my Mac using EyeTV, as I tend to do with most shows these days. Once recorded, I then edit TV shows to remove commercials (take that Australian TiVo). Here’s the EyeTV timeline showing where the ads are (the blue/grey areas) in episode 2:

That seems to me to be an awful lot of ads in one TV show (or in this case, part 2 of a TV show).

So, I did some calculations:

• The show’s total length was 2 hours 47 minutes
• There were 12 ad breaks
• Removing ads the show went for 2 hours 6 minutes
• The commercials shown went for a total of 41 minutes

That’s right – a show that went for 2 hours 6 minutes had 41 minutes of commercials – 1/4 of the entire show was advertising, or to put it another way, they added commercials making up 1/3 of the total running time of the actual movie. And that doesn’t include:

• Popup advertising showing the next TV show:

• Lotto results:

• The incredibly insulting squashing of credits to advertise other shows at the end of the show:

It really is no wonder that people are turning away from Free-to-air television. The commercial stations need to find a new source of revenue – more and more people are not going to put up with this crap. Which of the Australian networks is most likely to be first to realise this? Seven doesn’t look like a candidate.