As of Mac OSX Lion, Apple’s iCloud service is still a bit on the raw side, and it can be pretty painful to get it working with any sophistication across multiple iOS devices and Macs. Since it took [...]]]> Ok, long post here. Consider yourself warned. Maybe I should make this into a 50 page iBook.

As of Mac OSX Lion, Apple’s iCloud service is still a bit on the raw side, and it can be pretty painful to get it working with any sophistication across multiple iOS devices and Macs. Since it took me way too long to get things working for me, here’s a post on how to set things up so that you can share some info across a family without sharing absolutely everything.

One advantage to what I’m about to describe is that far less data will be stored in each iCloud account, and should let everyone in your family stay under the 5GB free iCloud account size.

the problem

iCal: I want different calendars for each person in our family, plus “Other” and “Family.” Easy enough in iCal; working for years. But I want all of my family’s Apple devices to be able to see/edit our overlapping calendars. Each person will be able to edit their calendar on any of our devices, and they’ll all stay in sync through iCloud.

Address Book: my wife and I have a large address book of family and friends. Most of this is “shared address book,” and I want this data to show up on all of our iOS and Mac accounts. However, it’d be great to be able to have our own additions that aren’t shared (my biz contacts, her old boyfriends, etc.), and of course we want our kids to have a different Address Book with their friends, while still having access to the shared family and friends email and phone numbers. This part is way too complicated in iCloud currently, since in Lion there’s no “Share this Group” or “Share this Address Book” like there is with iCal.

iTunes: we want to share purchases among some or all of us. Books, movies, etc. Easy enough, since you can log into iTunes with a different Apple ID than the ones you use for iCloud in general. There are lots of references to this on the web. Note that it’s all or nothing. I don’t know of a way to share purchased Books with Person A but purchased music with Person B. In my house, I share all iTunes purchases with my wife and younger son (since we buy his apps for him), and share Kindle purchases with my older son (since we read similar stuff). The older son has his own iTunes account for his app purchases, which is a disadvantage in that he ends up re-purchasing some stuff.

Documents, Bookmarks: those, we don’t want to share. We each want our own iCloud syncing for those, just for our devices or login IDs.

Ok, that’s what I want to do. Now let’s get it done. Apple doesn’t make this quite straightforward enough, and in fact there are caveats I had to work around (weird side effects and bugs). I’ll just jump to how I solved the situation, so you don’t have to mess around with the non-workable solutions.

beware! there be dragons here!

Be a bit careful if you find yourself deleting existing accounts from your Mac. The alerts in Lion are pretty good about telling you what’s going on, but it’s best if you take your time and read them if you’re inexperienced. You don’t want to lose or duplicate data. The good thing is, when you’ve got iCloud sync’ing turned on, you’re not really losing your data, just removing it from a particular device.

There’s a worse problem that you can run into though, and that is Merging data. For instance, if Fred and Ethyl have copies of an address book rather than a shared address book, you could easily end up Merging two address books into a single master address book and have a ton of duplicate data. I suggest you avoid doing this, or else prepare to comb through the data and get rid of the garbage. It can be messy.

Either way, I hope you’re using Time Machine to do backups to a local Time Capsule or an external drive. If so, even the nastiest problems can be recovered and fixed, though some of these problems may require a call to Apple tech support, since restoring an entire Address Book from a backup can be tricky.

multiple iCloud accounts on your Macs

The key to using iCloud to solve the family problem above is to create multiple iCloud accounts. The magic of course is in creating the right ones, and sharing them in the right way. Since every iOS device, or every Mac account has to have a “master” iCloud account, and only the “master iCloud account” on a device can do some types of sync like Documents, Back to My Mac, and Find My Device, it’s important to set up an independent “main” one properly for each device.  [Note: you can have multiple user login accounts on a single Mac of course, though not currently on a single iOS device like a phone or iPad. In that case, each Login account can have a separate master iCloud account associated with it]

Basically, we’re going to create iCloud accounts that match each person, and optionally an iCloud account that has non-person data that’s intended to be shared. Something like this:

• Fred’s devices (your devices) have accounts that look like this:
• iCloud.Fred (Fred’s master iCloud account)
• iCloud.Ethyl (Ethyl’s master iCloud account, which is a secondary account on Fred’s devices)
• iCloud.Shared (Optional. Shared iCloud data that Fred and Ethyl both edit but neither “owns.” This may be useful if there are lots of you, as in a larger family)
• Ethyl’s devices would then look like this:
• iCloud.Ethyl (Ethyl’s iCloud account is the primary one on her devices)
• iCloud.Fred (Fred’s is now a secondary iCloud account on Ethyl’s devices) *
• iCloud.Shared (again, optional. Would be present as secondary iCloud accounts on both devices, as well as on the devices of their kids, little Ricky and Lucy, and the twins Ethanol and Methanol)

In the rest of this post, when I talk about You, I’m talking about Fred. And vice versa. Your name is now Fred. You’ll need to do your own paperwork to have it changed legally. Different blog post.

Regarding the icloud.Shared account idea: I don’t currently do this myself, but I might if I want my kids to have access to only a limited subset of our Address Book list.

* At the bottom of this post is an even simpler version, which will make more sense after you read through the rest of the post!

Since you’ll be creating multiple iCloud accounts, you’ll need to keep them straight. I did this by editing them on my Mac and renaming them things like “iCloud.fred” and “iCloud.ethyl” and “iCloud.shared” and so forth. You don’t have to rename them like “iCloud.Fred” or some such, but you’ll be much less confused if you follow a naming standard like that and keep it the same everywhere.

If you have already set up iCloud, you can make changes to your account or add secondary accounts, rename them, etc. If not, you can follow along below.

Do this on a Mac: go to Preferences>Mail, Contacts & Calendars. In the screenshot below you can see I’ve got a bunch of accounts set up, including two iCloud accounts.

The first iCloud entry is my main one on my Macs and iOS devices. If you looked at my wife’s account, iOS devices, etc., you’d see the second one showing up as the main entry for her (and mine as secondary). Just like Fred and Ethyl in the example above.

If you were to click the one I’ve named “iCloud.doug…” you’d see this:

Note I’m sync’ing Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, Photo Stream (which I don’t really use yet but what the heck), and Documents. Essentially, everything.

Here’s the rub, though: my Calendar and Address Book (the ones synced into the iCloud.doug account) list basically contain nothing at all. The Address Book list only has one contact in it: my own. This way I can open my contacts list, choose myself and in the Card menu, choose “Make this my card.” That’s important, so that my devices will know who I am. On a Mac, that info appears to be used all over the place (login screen, IM name, etc.) so it’s important that you have at least that one Address Book entry. You can add more, of course. I could put any me-specific addresses there, like my business contacts that don’t need to clutter up our family contacts list.

Note the “Details…” button. Click it and set the Description to be something more than “iCloud”–as I noted, I use something like “iCloud.doug” so I can keep my various iCloud accounts easily differentiated. This doesn’t change any functionality; it just helps you keep the iCloud accounts visually separate.

So this is now my main iCloud account. I could have set it up in Preferences>iCloud just as easily, but you can’t set up the secondary iCloud accounts in that Preferences pane.

To reiterate: the important thing here is that your Master iCloud account (the one showing up in the iCloud preferences pane, and the first one you set up on your iOS devices) is yours and yours alone.

Now to create a second iCloud account. Back in the Mail, Contacts & Calendars preferences, click the “+” button to add another account, and add another iCloud account. You’ll need an Apple ID, but you can create one here if you don’t already have a second one. This second iCloud account will be secondary for me, and primary for another member of my family. I’ll call it “iCloud.marci” (my wife’s name; you may be married to someone else for all I know. From my website traffic, most access to this blog comes from SpamBots in Russia. No idea about spambot love).

For that second iCloud account, you want to only sync the data you wish to share. Mostly that’s going to be the Contacts list (a.k.a. Address Book), though it could also be the Calendar. In my case, all I’m sharing from my wife’s iCloud account (on my Macs and iOS devices) is the Contacts list. And if I wanted us to have a separate shared Contacts list that neither of us ‘owned’ (family and shared friends, for instance) then that’s the only one I’d be linking to as Secondary.

Make sense?

Caveat: since you can only do Photo Stream sync on your primary iCloud account, you can’t take sync from Fred’s iOS devices (for instance) to Ethyl’s computer. In my case this makes Photo Stream non-useful, since on our main Mac, my wife’s login is where we keep our shared iPhoto repository. So she can use Photo Stream effectively, but I can’t. No big deal right now.

multiple iCloud accounts on iOS devices

This works just like on the Mac. Set up your iPad or iPhone with your primary iCloud account first (iCloud.Fred in this example, if you’re Fred), and then go into the Mail, Contacts and Calendars and add the secondary (iCloud.Ethyl) accounts. Set up the “stuff to sync” exactly the same as you did on your Macs, and name the accounts the same way.

All of your devices and logins should look the same from the Accounts standpoint. They should all have your iCloud account as primary, and should all have the same secondary iCloud accounts, and all of the ‘stuff sync’d through iCloud’ should match (unless you want to go off road here and have some reason to keep some data off the iOS devices. That’s fine).

setting up shared calendars

I mentioned earlier that I want everyone in my family to have a calendar, but that I want everyone to be able to see how their calendar events overlap. That’s because we’re a family and the folks driving (Fred and Ethyl) need to know the big picture.

There are several ways to solve this with iCloud. The easiest is this: define a person (Ethyl, for instance) who will “own” the master calendar. Then on everyone else’s devices and logins, make sure that Ethyl’s iCloud account is set up as a secondary iCloud account, and that you’re syncing Calendars on that account. Then turn off calendar sync for your primary (Fred) iCloud account. The result should be that when you launch iCal (Mac) or Calendar (iOS) everyone will see (and edit) Ethyl’s calendars. When you look at the Calendars list (there’s a popup at the top left of the app) you’ll only see Ethyl’s iCloud account and her calendars.

But don’t think of this as “Ethyl’s calendar” as you’re really just using her iCloud account to hold the data. There’s no other special ‘ownership’ here. In any iCal account you can set up multiple calendars. Putting the whole family’s into a single account is, for me, much simpler that spreading these out across multiple accounts. Here’s how ours looks:

More about “_not used” later. Don’t Panic!

In this case, I’ve also got a Microsoft Exchange account (from work) sync’ing into iCal. This lets me (or my wife) see my work calendar if needed, to avoid overlaps when scheduling family events.

But the important thing is to see that we’ve set up multiple color-coded calendars in a single iCloud account: Family (stuff we’re doing either all at once, or with several of us), a schedule for each individual, and an “Other” category (other events, folks coming to town, etc.).

The nice thing about this is that each of us can check or uncheck (hide and show) these calendars separately on our devices. So my son B can show only his schedule and the family schedule if he wants.

Because iCloud doesn’t care who ‘owns’ the calendar, we can all have this calendar as a Secondary iCloud account on our devices, and we’ll all have the same access to it, sync’d through the cloud. In practice, I have the calendar on my wife’s iCloud account, but I could have set up a third iCloud account just for the calendars and Address Book as I’d noted before).

Caveat: we can all edit the entire calendar. It hasn’t been a problem, but if there’s a “view only” method here so that Ethyl can see but not alter Fred’s calendar, I haven’t needed to look for it. There’s probably something in Delegate preferences that would do this, but I haven’t bothered.

finishing up shared calendar setup

The issue with the approach above is that iCloud.Fred (your account) can’t have a totally empty Calendar. You need to have at least one calendar, even though you don’t need to put any events in it. Above, you can see I named mine “_not used,” and it’s un-checked. It’s literally not used.

This lets me utilize the iCloud.Fred account (or in my case, iCloud.doug) for the one thing that is unique to my calendar though: Reminders. I don’t share a task list with Ethyl, I want my own. So as far as iCloud is concerned, I’m syncing two calendars (Fred’s and Ethyl’s), but the only data I’m putting in my own calendar is my Reminders (tasks).

I set that up in iCal by hiding the task lists that aren’t mine (top right of iCal):

…and by making sure that any new Reminders go into my Reminders list using iCal>Preferences:

Caveat: iCal is kinda stupid at present with iCloud, and doesn’t show the customized iCloud names. I’ve gotten around that here by naming my Reminders lists “Reminders-DSB” in a similar way that I named my iCloud accounts, so that Fred’s reminder list is a different name than Ethyl’s. Just helps to keep them straight.

another way to set up shared calendars

I’m no longer using this, but…

There’s another way to share calendars, and that’s to mark a calendar as Shared within iCal. You then “Subscribe” to that calendar on another Mac. This feature has been around for a while, and lets you share calendars either privately or publicly. I suppose you could use this to share some but not all calendars out of an account (as opposed to the method I shows above, which would share all calendars in an account). Frankly, I think the method above is more straightforward and feels more secure. Not sure if it is or not, but it seems easier to me.

To share a specific calendar in iCal (e.g. “Doug Schedule” in the screenshot above) is easy, as there’s a Share option in iCal and plenty of documentation on the Mac or online about it. This is actually the first method I used to get my calendars shared, but I’m going away from it now so that everything’s done through iCloud accounts as shown here. It’s just more straightforward.

Why would you use this Share Calendar/Subscribe to calendar method? I suppose if I wanted someone else (my mom, for instance) to see one of our calendars, I could Share that calendar and then Subscribe to it on her Mac. I haven’t needed to do this, but there ya go.

Contacts/Address Book

Contacts (iOS) and Address Book (Mac) (isn’t that so non-Apple, naming the same things differently? C’mon, Apple!) have one caveat here: if you want to have more than one contact list, so that Fred has some contacts and Ethyl has other contacts, you need to know that the Contacts/Address Book apps will show you the set of both Fred+Ethyl, but when looking at “All Contacts” you can’t visually tell whether a given contact is in Fred’s list or Ethyl’s.

Worse, when adding a new contact, it’s not obvious whether you’re adding it to Fred’s list or Ethyl’s. My suspicion is that you’ll always be adding a contact to the primary iCloud account on your device whenever you’re looking at a sum of both lists, but I haven’t checked to see for sure.

At any rate, think about this when you add new contacts. Luckily, it’s easy (on Mac, anyway) to copy these around if you mess up, by looking at the Groups view of the Contacts list. Then you’ll be able to see the accounts separately and move contacts from one list to another.

I get around this problem because we currently only have a single contacts list, so in my Mac Address Book preferences, I tried disabling my own iCloud account:

BUG ALERT: However, when I did that, I found that the Mac was seeing only one user labeled “Me”–my wife, who had herself correctly labeled as “Me” on her iCloud-sync’d address book–and that was causing my Mac to call me “Marci” in the Messages app, in IM apps, and in the log-in screen, as well as using her picture instead of mine.

So I re-enabled the checkbox above, and made sure that her picture was correctly associated with her name (on her account) in Address Book, while my picture was correctly associated with my name (on my account) in Address Book.

Here’s what this looks like in Address book, when you view all of the accounts:

I shortened the picture, hence the gray band. All of our saved Groups of addressees–invite lists, etc.–normally show there.

I’ll need to make sure that any new addresses I add get moved over into the ‘shared’ address book (her iCloud account) if I want her to be able to see them. Since she is usually the one to add new people (she’s far more likable than me) this isn’t a big deal, and making corrections is easy.

In the future, Apple might make this easier to deal with. Let’s hope.

finishing up: set up your iOS devices

Remember that I’d said that Fred’s iOS devices should have the same iCloud sync settings as Fred’s Macs (or Fred’s Mac login accounts if you share computers with Ethyl)? Once I set things up the same way (same accounts in the system settings, same stuff sync’d in each account), I’m able to use my Calendars,  Contacts and Reminders on all of my iOS devices (iPhone, iPad) just like on the Mac. I’m not bothering with screen shots, but essentially it’s similar end results:

Fred’s Calendar app shows the calendars from Ethyl’s iCloud account (the dummy “_not used” calendar is unchecked). Settings on the iOS device determine what calendar new events get added to, so that’s under Fred’s control.

Fred’s Contacts list shows the sum of Fred+Ethyl’s calendars (or just Ethyl’s if you set things up to have a single master contact list)

Fred’s Reminders app shows only Fred’s reminders.

how does this work with FaceTime and Messages, etc?

Just dandy. Since you/Fred has got your own iCloud account, use that one to register your account with FaceTime, Message, etc. and you’re good to go on each device or Mac login.

Hope this helped somebody. It’ll at least help me, next time I need to set this stuff up!

I’d love to see comments and questions. Have at it!

—–

postscript: an even simpler setup

Now that you understand all this gobbledygook, here’s a simpler setup you can use if you are mostly concerned about two people sharing data, and you’re willing to have one of the accounts ‘own’ everything. This is the most similar to my own setup at present.

In this setup, Ethyl’s accounts are the “main” iCloud accounts where the calendars and contacts are stored:

• Fred’s devices (your devices) have accounts that look like this:
• iCloud.Fred (Fred’s master iCloud account)
• iCloud.Ethyl (Ethyl’s master iCloud account, which is a secondary account on Fred’s devices)

• Ethyl’s devices look like this:
• iCloud.Ethyl (Ethyl’s iCloud account is the primary one on her devices)
• no other iCloud accounts are need for Ethyl’s devices, because all of the calendars and contacts are already in her iCloud. That’s what makes this one simpler!

So here, only Fred (and additional users like Ricky and Lucy) would need more than one iCloud account on their iOS devices. Ethyl, the data owner, would only need her own.

But my stereo is old, and doesn’t accept HDMI inputs. And my high-def TV doesn’t have audio output. So I needed two separate cables out of the XBox: one for [...]]]> I recently bought myself an XBox 360, and intended to hook it up to my HDTV for high-def video, and to my stereo for audio.

But my stereo is old, and doesn’t accept HDMI inputs. And my high-def TV doesn’t have audio output. So I needed two separate cables out of the XBox: one for video (the HDMI cable) and one for audio (analog 2-channel would do).

It never occurred to me that the XBox couldn’t do this, as I knew that it had several outputs on the back. I did know that an HDMI cable didn’t come with the XBox, but I had an extra one already. However, when I opened the XBox box, I found a couple of F-You’s from our pals at Microsoft:

First, the XBox came with a nonstandard “weird cable” adapter that goes from the XBox’s Weirdo Port (some elongated thing that I’m sure Microsoft has a name for but I’ve never seen before) to analog audio (left and right RCA cables, which is exactly what I needed for my stereo) plus crappy analog RCA video, which is useless and won’t allow for high def (or even reasonable video quality).

Secondly, although the XBox had both the Weirdo Port and a standard HDMI video port, these were directly one atop the other on the back of the XBox.

Thirdly, the F-You cable that Microsoft gave me was designed with an unreasonably fat piece of gray plastic at the end which completely covered the HDMI port, preventing me from plugging in both HDMI and Weirdo Port cables at the same time!

Naturally, in a final F-You, Microsoft offered to sell me an upgraded Weirdo Port cable that would split into both HDMI and analog audio. For $50. I should point out that eBay has similar adapters for about $10.

[I should point out that if I had surround sound on this particular system, I would have had to buy one of these adapters, since I'd have needed an optical Toslink connector rather than 2-channel RCA analog cables. But I didn't need that this time.]

But the heck with it: I figured that since I was going to be stuck with a useless Weirdo Port cable anyway, I might as well take the thing apart and see if I could make it fit with the HDMI at the same time.

Guess what? It worked! If you break off the grey plastic cover at the end of the F-You Weirdo Port cable, the actual metal part is nice and thin, and fits just fine with an HDMI cable. Both can be inserted at the same time, and both ports are completely active. Video goes out the HDMI port, and audio goes out the Microsoft-supplied F-You cable.

Tip for breaking off the gray plastic cover from Microsoft’s cable:

The sides of that hard plastic have a groove. I first tried to wrench them apart with a screwdriver, but that’s a losing proposition. Here’s the really simple way: if you have a vise in your workshop (you DO have a garage workshop, don’t you?) just gently use the vise and you can crack the plastic pieces apart like a walnut shell.

If you don’t happen to have a vise, I bet you could do the same thing with a pair of pliers. Or a few gentle taps with a hammer.

Anyway, you’ll be up and running in a few minutes, and save the money and aggravation.

Hey – I’m considering a Mac Mini to do a home entertainment solution as per your config. A few questions:

• What do you use to connect to your TV screen? Are you happy with the quality? I like the idea of the flexibility provided by a Mac Mini vs Apple TV, [...]]]> Name Withheld asks,

Hey – I’m considering a Mac Mini to do a home entertainment solution as per your config. A few questions:

• What do you use to connect to your TV screen? Are you happy with the quality? I like the idea of the flexibility provided by a Mac Mini vs Apple TV, but notice that the Mini does not have HD out.

Dear NW,

The Mac Mini can certainly do an HD signal. New ones have two video outputs: you convert either the mini-dvi to HDMI or mini-display port to HDMI. Your best best is probably the mini-display port to HDMI rather than mini-dvi, as that gives a higher resolution (and supports HDCP, which is the horrible copy protection that the industry created in order to make life that much more difficult for people trying to hook up their gear). But they’re both digital signals.

For what it’s worth, I have an older Mini and an older HDTV without enough digital inputs, so I just get 780 rather than full 1080 out of the Mac Mini. It looks great, though.

I don’t believe that the Mini as of this writing (or Apple’s software) puts audio out over the mini-display port, so converting that output to HDMI will only give you video unless that changes. There are, however, solutions for this. There’s a “Kanex” cable from Apogee that, on the Mac side, gets power and audio from the USB port and video from mini-display and converts both of those to a single HDMI. There are probably other adapters like this as well: search for “mini-display plus usb to hdmi.”

But here’s the deal: you only need a cable like this if you want both audio and video over HDMI. That would be appropriate if you intend to put the HDMI cable directly into a TV that has speakers (in general, yuck!). Or if you’re sending the HDMI cable into the back of a stereo receiver.

If, however, you’re running the HDMI cable into a recent stereo receiver, then you probably have several options apart from getting both audio and video over the HDMI cable. You could, for instance, hook a mini phono plug (it’s like mini headphones) into the audio output of the Mac Mini and route that into the stereo. Or better yet, the Mac Mini uses that same audio output for an optical digital signal, which can carry audio over a “Toslink” connector to your stereo and give you 5.1 surround sound. You’ll need a mini-optical to Toslink adapter cable. I found one at Radio Shack.

One good reason to go from the Mini to a stereo is so that you can play audio from your Mac through your stereo without having to turn the TV on. I detail some of this in a previous post, and talk more about it below.

* * *

• How do you navigate the UI of the mini on your TV screen? Do you use a keyboard or are you able to navigate with a remote? If a remote, the one that comes with the Mini or something you bought separately?

I can navigate a lot of ways. The Apple Remote (which used to come with the Mac Mini but is now a separate purchase, I believe) is primarily for the Front Row application that comes with Mac OS, but I don’t use Front Row. I have too much audio for that UI, and I don’t like the screensaver.

Rather, I do like Front Row visually, but I’m concerned about burn-in given the type of TV I have. I think they use a different screensaver on Apple TV. The one that Front Row uses has areas of pure white that switch out every 20 seconds or so but nevertheless stay on the same region of the screen. So unless you’ve got a TV that won’t suffer from burn-in (and nearly all of them do), it’s not a solution for hours-at-a-time use in my opinion.

So back to the remote control question:

We have a lot of gear (stereo, Mini, TV, DVR, wii, etc.), so I use Logitech’s Harmony remote. Really excellent way to control everything if you don’t mind spending a while setting it all up. M wouldn’t have been able to do it, but now that I set everything up it’s easy for her and the kids to control it all.

Love the Harmony remote. We have two of them. The new models use Bluetooth and then use a re-broadcaster to convert that to infrared (IR) signals to control your stuff. If you can handle the cable complication this is a good thing, because a universal remote that’s setting up (or turning off) multiple pieces of equipment must otherwise keep pointing at your gear until it finishes sending the slow IR signals. Bluetooth means that you can press the button on the remote and it doesn’t matter where it’s pointing.

Not an issue for me, but my wife and kids sometimes forget and only half of the gear turns off.

So that’s the Harmony universal remote, which I can use to turn on and off everything, control volume, play and pause, etc. There are other ways to control the Mini as well, more directly. What I use depends on what I’m trying to do:

- Wireless mouse to directly access the machine, though often we access it over screensharing from other laptops etc. without ever turning on the TV (for audio, we just need the stereo!). You’ll need a wireless mouse and wireless keyboard, unless you’re going to control the Mac Mini entirely ‘headlessly’ over VNC/screensharing. It can certainly be done, but sometimes something will go wrong with the screensharing (another app will interfere with it, or a system update or something) and you’ll want to access the Mac directly. Hence the keyboard and mouse. I don’t use these very often, though, as a TV isn’t a great computer monitor. Small text that’s perfectly readable two feet from your face becomes really hard to see from a couch.

- Remote (the iPhone app) for playing audio. Again, no need to turn on the TV. I use this constantly. Love it! I can play any audio in my library (thousands of albums), controlled from my iPhone or iPod Touch. Since I have several Airport Express’ in different rooms of my house (all hooked to smaller satellite speakers) I can actually control volume and turn off different sets of speakers, too. All from my iPhone.

- VNC Lite (iPhone App) when I need to screenshare to the Mini. Not usually necessary, since I can get to screenshare from any other computer in the house. But it’s really cool and has come in handy several times.

- Air Mouse (iPhone app) — really cool. Uses the iPhone as a mouse. Since my iPhone is nearly always in my pocket, this is what I often grab when the TV is actually on, rather than using the wireless mouse. In fact, if you carry around an iPhone anyway, and the wireless mouse isn’t an every day thing for you on the Mac Mini, you can avoid the mouse altogether and just use the Air Mouse application. Apple should buy this.

The most minimal setup would be:

- a wireless mouse (or iPhone + “Air Mouse”) and keyboard for when the TV is actually on and you need to access the Mini directly

- “Remote” on the iPhone/iPod Touch to just control what songs or albums are playing

]]> http://www.dsbenson.com/2009/12/mac-mini-to-tv/feed/ 4 http://www.dsbenson.com/2009/12/mac-mini-to-tv/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dsbenson/~3/tqUaIXESBdM/ http://www.dsbenson.com/2009/11/beijing-5-odd-duck/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 17:20:09 +0000 dsbenson http://www.dsbenson.com/?p=642 I had been walking all day, starting south of QianMen in one of the old Beijing Houtongs, remnants of a much older Beijing. I worked my way through the crumbling old neighborhood to the LiQun duck restaurant mentioned in a guidebook, a small, out of the way place where the only English I heard spoken was the word [...]]]> I had been walking all day, starting south of QianMen in one of the old Beijing Houtongs, remnants of a much older Beijing. I worked my way through the crumbling old neighborhood to the LiQun duck restaurant mentioned in a guidebook, a small, out of the way place where the only English I heard spoken was the word “Duck.”

“Duck?” Yes, I nodded. Duck.

They brought me a whole, massive roast duck, shiny and red, a duck that until its recent loss of motility had been as well fed as I was about to be. Carved into neat stacks of thin slivers, it overflowed two large plates. Add dishes of sauce, sliced cucumbers, sprouts, thin pancakes to wrap it all in and a large Yangling beer so as to avoid the dangers of tap water. Enough food for my whole table. Unfortunately I was the only one sitting there at the time. Apparently I ordered the People’s Liberation Army Officers’ Mess Hall Happy Meal.

After honoring the duck who gave its life to fill my table, I spent the entire day waddling it off. Tienanmen Square (Chinese for “You can’t get there from here”) is enormous, much larger than I had imagined. It’s more Official than ugly, and sized for a few million people.

I was a half hour too late to see the Maosoleum, where the frozen popsicle of Chairman Mao’s body is brought upward daily out of the deep freeze to be displayed to the flag waving crowd. When I was a kid, everyone “knew” that Walt Disney had cryogenically frozen his body somewhere deep in Cinderella’s Castle. Apparently Mao had heard this as well, but actually had it done.

Well, it gives me a reason to go back to Beijing. Can’t see everything in one trip.

In the endless flat plaza of Tienanmen Square, children call out to me, and Chinese tourists come up to say Hello or take their pictures with me. Some really are tourists, I’m sure. Anyone who can speak a few words of English. Others want to walk with me, “practice their English,” see the sights with me—as long as those sights include a stop at a local teahouse where, I’m sure, my bill would somehow end up much higher than it ought to be. I politely demur and insist on going where they will not follow. The men’s room works well for this.

Here’s a tip: if you’re walking in Tienanmen Square and very friendly young Chinese claim they’re also tourists and want to see the sights with you, head toward the giant portrait of Mao outside the ticket gates of the Forbidden City. That place charges admission, so it’s bound to shake off any lampreys.

The Forbidden City is huge. They don’t call it the Forbidden City Block, after all. Emperors had to stick palace after palace in the place just to have places to rest as they walked in their enormously heavy Star Wars outfits from one end to the other. It’s quite impressive, and the GPS-enabled headset was well done, but I got Ming’d out after a few hours in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity, Hall of Mental Cultivation, Palace of Oh My God My Feet Are Killing Me!

As sun set, I continued northward skirting Jingshan park through another old Houtong where Deng Xiaoping had lived. Here in the remnants of old Beijing beyond the Forbidden City, where once the relatives of the emperor, courtiers and eunuchs lived, the extremely wealthy now live in large homes connected side by side with poor families crammed into squalid 10 meter rooms, a warren where multiple families share a single cold shower from a barrel on the roof and babies squat to crap in the alleyways.

Still further north I came to a series of beautiful lakes surrounded by bars, restaurants, gardens: Beihei, Quianhai, Houhai. A truly lovely place to stroll, where young lovers boat on tranquil waters reflecting multicolored lights from shore. I joined a group of giggling girls at an outdoor grill and pointed my way through roasted spiced meat on a stick and some sort of sugared fruit before continuing northward past the tourist areas, through the quiet areas around Xihai lake and onward toward a subway station.

Ten hours of a most excellent walking tour of Beijing, a city not known for being walkable!

I ate quite a lot of good food on this trip, though what sticks in my mind (and my teeth) are the challenging fare I consumed…

At lunch with the China development team: Pigs foot and a bowl of gelatinous sea vegetable soup that was filled with tiny white wormlike fish that had little black spots for eyes.

At a mountain retreat with Wang Ping and Justin: a trout I caught in a heavy net, well seasoned and full of bones.

At the infamous Wangfujing night market: ostrich on a stick, raw sea urchin I ate directly from the spiny urchin body, fried scorpions, odd desserts.

I didn’t try the bloated and extremely nasty looking silkworms, though in my defense I did try silkworms two weeks later…at lunch with my team back in San Francisco!

11:50. At [...]]]> It’s a short line of sleepy, shuffling rather-be slumberers at 11:15 pm Sunday night in the Air China waiting line. LAX is a wishy-washy pile of an airport, closer to Lacks or Ex-LAX than to re-LAX. It’s taking five minutes a person to move the line ahead. China here I come, albeit slowly.

11:50. At the gate, and the plane won’t board for another hour and 20 mins. Damn. Arrived too early this time. Nothing to do, and little enough juice to do it with. Need to find an electrical outlet and juice up. Should buy a sandwich, water, bottle of coffee for morning: the essentials. Gotta get some currency as soon as the cash transmutation office opens at midnight. I’ll need small bills to hit the ground running at 5:30 Tuesday morning in Beijing.

1:25. I’ve boarded an Air China plane the size of Rhode Island, a fossilized 747 from the Ming dynasty. Hope they’ve changed the oil. They’re playing Silent Night over the speaker system at nearly subliminal volume. Sleep in heavenly peace, indeed. I sure hope so. The pharmacopia in my backpack will undoubtedly help.

Only a few minutes to go now before my row-mate and I are declared the winners. We are separated by an empty seat and have no row behind us, yet still recline. This impossible jetliner is nearly full, a flying Cruise Ship, a winged office tower of the skies.

Should have ordered the special meal. Peruvian goat clusters, Pygmy ham, jellied snake milk salad. I’ll probably sleep through food. The sandwich I crammed in my bag will be rank and spoiled by dawn’s early light. After all, we cross the date line and don’t land until Tuesday. Ahead and behind me the rows of seats stretch to an infinite vanishing point, as if you’d end up back in coach if you continued forward far enough, through business class, first class, double platinum ultra class. I can see the left side of the plane curving inward far ahead of me. Perhaps the plane is donut-shaped, and will roll all the way to China.

The giant airlock behind us grinds close with bank vault finality. Things are looking up. We win! We win! High fives and extra seating space all around. Adios, city of angels!

We taxi slowly with darkened cabin lights. A hush falls over the long body of the plane, and some passengers nod off. Those fuzzy voices from the speakers are probably telling us to turn off our iPhones now. But the voices are in Chinese, so it doesn’t count, so I keep blogging.

Yep. English now, fuzzy as a drive-through and no, there are no fries with that. See you later.

Ambien. Slept for 6 hours, then watched The Watchmen. Billy Crudup’s blue prothesis isn’t as impressive on such a tiny screen. Falling asleep briefly, I was shaken awake at 4:30 AM to open my window and watch our dark descent.

Fewer lights than expected, given the density of population.

I am in China.

It takes five minutes to deplane and go through customs, much faster to enter China than the US. The new wing of the international airport, built for the 2008 Olympics, is huge, and soaring, modern, beautiful. And nearly empty in the pre-dawn, an echoing cathedral to tourism.

It very silent here so far, and my phone is as disoriented as I am.

Walking through these Olympic caverns overhung by black skies, we are passed in the other direction by a phalanx of midnight-uniformed airport workers who descend a broad escalator four abreast, each wearing a sky-blue surgical mask. I am filled with confidence. Or germs.

In broken English, an elderly Chinese man asks me for directions. Oddly enough, I am able to give them. We are, after all, only going to baggage claim and the train won’t take us anywhere else.

5:45 AM at baggage claim.  Phone and email work as smooth as silk. Marci sounds like she’s standing next to me, whispering into my ear. A driver should have a sign for me. If not, I’ll look up the hotel website to get the address in Chinese.

5:50.  No problem. An attractive young woman met me just past the security zone and led me to an awaiting car.

We drive off toward the city. The sky is a deep blue with a hint of light around the corners. Trees planted thickly by the broad highway hide the landscape. Soon a concrete forest of new highrise apartment buildings rises above the fir tops.

The air shows early smog, but not as bad as the inversion I experienced in Delhi. It looks more like a light San Francisco marine layer misting. Luckily I am here in the fall, when the cool air keeps the pollution moving. Cranes everywhere testify to the pace of the construction economy. This is a place where the landscape changes quickly.

We arrive at The Opposite House, an amazing and very new hotel. Ultra modern. The room is so spotless and clean that I wouldn’t eat off the floor for fear of sullying it with my tongue.

A large cedar tub calls to me, siren-like, and I succumb to its still, warm embrace before meeting fellow travelers in the lobby.

Current theory based on several elevator trips at The Opposite House: successful young Chinese women are all cute and smell like flowers. Whereas I am large and smell like a wet dog.

Later modified theory after a groggy day of sightseeing: the average Chinese woman is not cute (same as the average human everywhere), and objects to being sniffed. But she can spit in your eye from ten feet away.

Everyone spits here. If the sidewalks were lined with spittoons the air would ring like hail on a tin roof.

Steven, Robert, Justin and I spend the day at the Summer Palace, a beautiful complex of palaces and Buddhist temples in the hills surrounding a lovely lake. There’s a lot of climbing and walking up sharp hills, and very little context in what we’re seeing. What’s with the venerated rocks? Vertical worm-eaten rock chimneys dot the palace grounds, as if x-marking the spots of a thousand ascensions to heaven. They sure like their piles of furrowed and twisted stone here. Signs on the barriers tell us to “Help Protect The Cultural Relics” and also “Help Protect The Railings.” No signs protect the signs, so they’re fair game. Scenic vistas and architecture crop up around every corner.

After a mid-afternoon lunch at a dumpling shop whose menu features items like “Clod Meat” and “Small bowl first Palestinian brain tendons,” we take the subway back toward our hotel. The subway is jam-packed, much like Tokyo at rush hour. But it’s very well marked, and bodiless voices call out the stops in both Chinese and clearly pronounced English. In fact, this subway is even easier to navigate than Tokyo’s.

Fat Buddhas are in abundance. Ditto for mosques. We pass several churches and a wedding party. For a bunch of godless heathen Communists, there sure is a lot of religion. Many things are not as I expected. I’m not seeing a lot of Soviet-style architecture, for one. My overall impression of Beijing is one of newness, construction, economic activity, success. There are many trees, and not a lot of trash. Beijing seems a lot closer to New York than New Delhi.

One regret that I must find a way live with for the rest of my life: I did not order the “small bowl first Palestinian brain tendons.” Now I will never know.

We are counting down the days until our oldest son, Ben, becomes a Bar Mitzvah. There are so many last-minute items to take care of, so Doug and I have divided the list and set out to conquer!

My task was going to Lucky’s, a [...]]]> <This is a guest post written by my wife, Marci>

We are counting down the days until our oldest son, Ben, becomes a Bar Mitzvah. There are so many last-minute items to take care of, so Doug and I have divided the list and set out to conquer!

My task was going to Lucky’s, a grocery store I normally try to avoid, to order the large platters of fruit and piles of fried chicken for the last event of the weekend, a picnic in the park for the remaining out of town guests. The last thing on my list was ordering the cake. After waiting ten minutes at the counter for someone to assist me, a woman finally comes to take my order.

I tell her I want the half-sheet cake, chocolate: chocolate filling, chocolate icing.

“What do you want the message to be?” she asks, getting out a pad and pencil.

I recite slowly: “Congratulations, Ben, You Made It!” Then I tell her, “Be sure to add the exclamation point.”

I look across the counter at her pad, where she’s written the following question: “Congratulations Ben you mad it?”

“No,” I say, “exclamation point!”

She says, “Yes, I have it. Did you want it somewhere else?”

“That is a question mark! I want an exclamation point! And I want an ‘e’ at the end of ‘mad,’ and while you’re at it, a couple of commas would be great, too.”

After several back and forths, she managed to write the words properly. The anticipation is killing me; I can’t wait until Sunday to see what actually shows up on the cake!

M and I had already dated throughout that school year, and at the time, nineteen was legal drinking age. Not that [...]]]> On the first occasion of my nineteenth, I was a college freshman, as full of self-doubt and angst as I was of acne. Bespotted where now I’m beamish, confused where now content, frustrated where now fruitful.

M and I had already dated throughout that school year, and at the time, nineteen was legal drinking age. Not that the milestone mattered to me, as I was a teetotaler for those four years. (I gave up not-drinking after college, when traveling through Europe.) I made the mistake that birthnight of abandoning M to head to a Thomas Dolby concert with my roommate, and returned to find that Marci had gone on a bender in my absence and wouldn’t speak to me until the next day.

Today I am nineteen yet again, having been married one less than twenty sun-go-rounds to my beautiful Marci, and in the kind of heaven that I would create were I the creator’s creator, I would inscribe for us a lifetime of lifetimes. Being limited to just one with her is not enough.

In my first XIX, I doubted I would ever be content, much less happy. On this second XIX, I may not be smarter, but I know better. And were I to travel back in time to frighten the earlier me, looking parentally old to my younger self though seeing the world similarly askew, I would offer this advice:

“Don’t worry, kiddo! Relax and have a good time. Be open and try to connect with people. It’ll all work out just fine.

“Oh—and buy some stock in Apple and Microsoft.”

On second thought, best not to change a thing. No idea what I’d inadvertently alter. I’d probably just watch my younger self from behind a tree and let the younger me continue to muddle through. Him with his t-shirt and flared-leg jeans, splattered with twenty colors of oil paint, wandering through campus feeling generally outside. No sign yet of a spreading middle and thinning hair–not that it’s hurt my looks, of course. Right? (To be sure, I peaked some undefined while back, but the lack of women throwing themselves at me now that it’s too late is offset by the lack of women throwing themselves at me back then when it wasn’t, so it all balances out.)

A bit over half a decade from now, I’ll be nineteen yet again: I look forward to reaching my nineteenth anniversary of fatherhood. I like the sound of that. B will have stopped having birthday parties by then—or at least parties that his parents throw—but that’s no reason for me to stop celebrating my own anniversaries of parenthood! And once again celebrating a nineteenth, five years further down life’s chute-the-chute, as G heads to college and we empty our nest. It seems as far ahead as my original nineteenth seems past, but it’s close, close, close.

In a long enough life, so many opportunities to be nineteen again. Gladly, only one full of my own teen angst and acne, my existential crises and frustrations social and sexual. The subsequent years have been increasingly mellow, even if I retain enough of my youthful intensity to frighten the natives on occasion. Luckily, I’ve had a wonderful partner to help me through the years, to look forward to our twenties with, and to make me a better person than perhaps I’d have been otherwise, if, just before my first nineteenth birthday, confused and crazed, I hadn’t fallen in love with the beautiful girl with the amazingly curly and thick brown hair.

I’ve spent several weeks in and around Tokyo over the past two visits, including side trips [...]]]> Comic books and electronics. Costumed kids and well dressed suits. Free Hugs, albeit often from kids born around the same time as the iPod, hanging out on the streets wearing hoop skirts, manga costumes and nose-obscuring bandages. Often simultaneously.

I’ve spent several weeks in and around Tokyo over the past two visits, including side trips to nearby towns and a bullet train to Kyoto. Interesting and accessible culture, beautiful sights, great food. Somehow it all works, and I find the youth culture—in a country with a birth rate just this side of the Vatican—quite fetching. So cute. Even the prostitutes wear outrageously fancy dresses, like Little Miss Muffet dressed for a remake of Gone With The Wind.

I imagine giant container ships in San Francisco Bay, now emptied of their Toyotas and riding high like Borg cubes upon the seas, setting sail from the Port of Oakland to carry back to Japan all of the once-worn U.S. prom dresses, freshly cleaned and pressed and ready to highlight the tiny waists of the evening girls in the Kabuchicho red-light district, who stroll up and down with parasols in front of the dive bars, just down the street from the glitter and glow of the multi-story, smoke filled Pachinko parlors.

I declaim to the warm Kabuchicho night air an impromptu street haiku:

wearing prom dresses
red lips on alabaster
japanese hookers

Six or so of us were in Tokyo doing research on a then-upcoming version of Adobe Flash Professional. It’s the sort o’ management thing I like to do between all the writing, sleeping, fathering, spousing and carousing. Tokyo is a wonderful city to visit. If the world hadn’t ended last year in an economic catastroclysm I’m sure I’d be heading there again soon. But what with the banks all ablaze, the polar bears melting and all of the swine coming down with New AIDS (or is that New SARS? I really can’t be bothered, though everyone keeps trying) it doesn’t look as though I’ll be headed to Japan again soon.

But the trip was fascinating. In the mornings en route to meetings, we headed upstream like salmon returning to spawn, through the glorious Shinjuku Station, the busiest train station in the world, through which nearly four million people travel each day. The press of the crowd is unbelievable, rivers of humanity flowing to and fro with astonishingly little friction, endless schools of self-synchronized minnows describing an intricate dance.

We all remarked on it: it’s unbelievable that so many people can move through this space at once without causing the world’s worst human gridlock. Were this anyplace else, people would be stomped to a pulp twenty times a day, like a never-ending Wal-Mart on the morning of the Black Friday sales. But people in Japan are not built that way. They move quickly through Shinjuku, but don’t shove. They don’t cut each other off. They don’t jockey for position as they queue up for escalators. They’re polite to one another at the turnstiles. It’s downright freakish.

The invisible little devil on my shoulder—who is, I should note, generally balanced out by another devil of roughly similar mass on my other shoulder—whispered in my ear and I started to grin as we headed through the morning crush. I was walking at the side of the lovely Emmy H, and we were talking about the experience of being there, in this surging sea of rapidly moving politeness. So unlike the States, and probably anywhere else.

I noted that even when we drifted briefly out of our flowing river and into a mass of people flowing in the counter direction, we still avoided accidents. “It’s amazing we can get through this crowd without hitting anybody.” Emmy said something about Brownian Motion as I pointed out the seeming impossibility of our little group making such rapid progress moving amid hundreds of thousands of others, all heading in different directions.

“Let’s do an experiment,” I said.

“What kind of experiment?”

“Well, I bet that if you and I move a few steps to our right, directly into the path of the oncoming flow, we won’t run into anybody even if we don’t look where we’re going.”

“How could we do that?”

“Simple,” I said. “We’ll just carry on a conversation and look each other in the eye as we walk, and be completely oblivious to the million other people walking straight at us.” Emmy demurred at first, but the thought had stuck in my mind with little fishhooks and wouldn’t let go. “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” She agreed, under duress. I have an a-hole’s idea of fun, sometimes. Decidedly not Japanese.

Our course set, we waited for the briefest of lulls in the crowd. We started talking animatedly and eased rightward, away from the rest of our companions and directly into the oncoming path of the multitudes, but ignoring everyone except each other in our conversation. The tension was high: it wasn’t easy to keep walking at a brisk rate while failing to look ahead, and we laughed nervously as we talked about nothing at all while assiduously avoiding looking anywhere other than at each other. On and on we walked, maintaining a rapid pace with both our feet and our conversation.

Not once were we stopped, shouted at or denounced by the crowds, the omnipresent loudspeakers or the giant, talking billboards. We never came within more than a few feet of any other traveler. It was like we possessed an invisible force field that radiated out ahead of us in a wedge pattern: the crowd smoothly and seamlessly parted for us without a trace of effort, merging together just behind.

We repeated the experiment over the next day or so, with the same results each time. Ugly Americans, perhaps. But hey! Anyone could get caught up in a conversation, right? It’s only ugly when you know we were pranking. Now, I don’t recommend this behavior in others, of course. It’s just like what they tell you at the National Parks: if everyone took home a pretty, shining rock, pretty soon there’d be none left.

(That was the National Park Service that said that, right? Could have been the time I saw the British Crown Jewels. Anyway, same concept.)

I tried the same trick again in a different train station. Didn’t work. I was in New York, walking through Central Station during the morning commute. In under three seconds, I was shoved to the ground, kneed in the groin and trampled to death while buskers from Trinidad played a rousing funeral march on the steel drums. After a while, someone came and helped themselves to my wallet. In the evening, a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic in search of the American Dream came with a pressure hose and washed the remaining blood stains into a drain while she whistled a popular merengue from her youth.

My body was never found.