My Jawbone headset arrived today. The Jawbone worked flawlessly with my Treo, but getting it to pair with my Mac and work with Skype was a bit more effort. This was somewhat frustrating since the primary reason for the purchase was to make Skype calls.
Before I get into what my solution was, I should mention that my Macintosh is slightly out of date. My Powerbook G4 runs OSX 10.3.9. It is possible that none of these problems exist on the latest version of OSX. Nevertheless, I know I’m not the only person out there still running 10.3, so I’ll post this with the hope that it saves at least one person a few minutes and some frustration.
The short answer was that two things needed to be done:
Download and run the Bluetooth Firmware Updater 1.2 from Apple. I ended up restarting the computer before running the updater for it to work properly.
Download and install the latest version of Skype (version 2.6.0.140 at the time).
Now for the slightly longer answer…
The first problem was pairing the headset with the computer. The computer recognized the headset but stated the hardware did not support headsets. This sounds worse than it really is since it is easily remedied with a firmware update. After downloading and installing the Bluetooth Firmware Updater 1.2, I ran it with no success. Not only did it fail to update anything, it also disabled bluetooth on the laptop. Fortunately, rebooting brought back bluetooth. Running the updater again after a fresh reboot seemed to do the trick. So, if you are having problems with this updater, I recommend you reboot and try again.
After the bluetooth update, pairing the headset with the computer was no problem at all. On the other hand, Skype wasn’t working quite right. Changing the audio preferences to work with the Jawbone did not work at all, there was no sound coming out of the headset. I mucked around with the audio preferences on the system and Skype for quite some time but nothing really seemed to work. What did end up working was updating to the latest Skype release (version 2.6.0.140 at the time).
Now, I’m happily Skyping with the Jawbone headset. Lesson learned: Use the latest version of software.
Google has released an early beta of their Gears offline browser extension. With Gears, a developer can make their web application available to users that are not connected to the internet. To accomplish this, the Gears browser extension includes its own database and server for local data storage and retrieval.
If you want to take Gears for a test drive, install Gears and fire up Google Reader. With Gears installed in your browser, you will get an alert when Google Reader loads telling you that the application wants to store some data on your local machine. If you allow this, there will be an additional option in the reader application that switches between online and offline mode. Switching between modes will sync up your local data with the server. In the case of Google Reader, changes to data such as marking an article as read will be carried over to the server when switching back to online mode.
Google Gears currently works with Firefox 1.5 and higher on Mac, Linux and Windows. Internet Explorer is also supported on Windows. Safari will be supported in a future release.
1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question below, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the nextbutton
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool …
Some of these are fairly apt, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide which ones:
Opening Credits:
Thievery Corporation - Incident At Gate 7
First Day At School:
The Police - Driven to Tears
Falling In Love:
Elvis Costello - Less Than Zero
Breaking Up:
Pearl Jam - Jeremy
Prom:
The Stone Roses - One Love
Mental Breakdown:
Letters to Cleo - Awake
Flashbacks:
The New Pornographers - The New Face of Zero and One
Getting Back Together:
Propeller Heads - History Repeating
Wedding Scene:
Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
Final Battle:
Beastie Boys - Hey Ladies/Shake Your Rump Mix
If you’ve never heard of Copilot, it is a service and (temporarily installed) piece of software that allows you to control a remote computer. It works through routers and firewalls, so it is great for getting though to PCs on a home network. Learn more on Fog Creek’s Site.
Streetsblog has a new StreetFilm showcasing the Berkeley Bike Station. Located in the Berkeley BART station, the bike station is a free, attended, secure location to park a bike. It is open between 7:00 and 21:00 and has a capacity of 70 to 100 bikes. They also have mechanics to fix your rig while you are gone.
There are very few bike stations in this country and I know of none in New York City. As a city that consistently finds itself at the top of high bike theft lists, New York is a natural location for bike station facilities. Most buildings in New York do not provide any sort of secure parking. It is also not uncommon to prohibit people from bringing bikes into office buildings. So, bike parking is a problem, especially for long periods of time (like a typical work day).
As in most cities, space is very precious here. However, with just a bit of creativity, I would think that placing some bike stations at strategic locations around town could be done quite easily. The City and large private property owners could carve out some space to construct such facilities. It also seems like an enterprising bike shop owner would be more than happy to staff a free bike station daily if they could offer up repair services and sell accessories on site. They could even sell bikes (not the bikes people park there or course, that would sort of discourage parking). These facilities would be a wonderful amenity to any neighborhood and, at the same time, remove one more barrier to cycling in New York City.
KatMouse is a sweet little windows utility that lets you scroll any window, active or not, with your scroll wheel. Just put the mouse cursor over the window you want to scroll and scroll away. This is great for those with massive or multiple displays.