Apple lies about AirPort

Here is where Apple lies, blatantly and repeatedly, about the Airport Extreme and how it can share your external hard drive. "Turn your external USB hard drive into a drive you can share with all the users on your network."



Then when you try and actually hook your hard drive up to the $180 router and you get an error message, you find out it doesn't support external drives for the latest versions of Windows like XP, 2000 and Vista (those using NTFS, the modern standard for Windows hard drives). NOWHERE did Apple disclose this, not online and not in the damn manual for the product.



An honest marketing pitch would read, "Turn your external USB hard drive into a drive you can share with all the users on your network by reformatting it and destroying all the data."



Oh and of course they've already obsoleted this product.



Oh and also? This "easy to use" brand new router didn't work with the software that shipped with my brand new Mac. I had to install a second AirPort Utility beyond the one already on the hard drive.



And no I'm not going to format the drive, it contains all the data from my old computer, and from at least two online accounts.





(PS Not even the tech specs of Airport Extreme divulge that NTFS is not supported.)

Blogger sucks with ecto, so I'm leaving Blogger

I'm going to have to move this site off Blogger, I use ecto, which rocks, and Blogger (run by Google) doesn't allow uploading of images from ecto or anything else using its third-party API.



Jesus Google, easy images is the single biggest reason to use a third-party app in the first place. Why did you bother even building the API??



Anyway, not a big deal. Blogging is just the single most important medium for human communication in the future. Not anything Google needs to be competitive at. Or, like, build a platform for.

(I am about 2X faster, at least, in ecto than through a Web interface, including Blogger's.)

Google Reader's OPML support sucks, here's how to fix it

At my new gig I deal a lot with OPML files, and Google Reader blows at this, here's how to fix (Chris Wetherell, it's not enough that you lent me sound equipment for my wedding, now I expect you to do custom software work for me too ;->):

• Allow me to view an OPML file on the Web live, as a folder, in Reader. I have an OPML list I have to reimport every couple weeks and it's annoying, I have to delete the old feeds associated with the prior version of the OPML file and then save the file to my hard drive then import the new feed then tag the imported feeds. The person sending me the file should just be able to update it on his Web server and the changes propagate instantly to Reader.



• Tag or otherwise group imported OMPL instead of just dumping into my account with no way to see what's newly imported. This is so basic.



• Allow me to export just a folder as OPML, not everything under the sun. And sharing on the Google Reader network is no substitute for this feature, my buddies/coworkers are not all on Reader.



• Likewise, allow me to import just one (or N) sections of a particular OPML file.



• Allow me to export a particular folder as OPML url, not just as a file.

OPML is one of those things that seems like an esoteric feature until you really, really need it and then you need it bad, working properly and smoothly, full featured.

The blogs I read when time is precious

I have been working very long days and had no time to read for pleasure for two or three weeks. Here are the blogs I read when I had bout an hour to spare, basically my absolute favorite blogs:

• Joel On Software
• Steve Yegge
• Daring Fireball
• Philip Greenspun
• Paul Graham
• Scripting News
• Signal Vs. Noise

I am such a massive nerd.