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After reading Daniel Walker Howe's brilliant history of the transformation of the U.S. in the early 1800s, What Hath God Wrought, and then researching a brief story on the establishment of Albany Time, I realized that our approach to time has become standardized, perfect, and wrong. Reading Ian Bartky's Selling the True Time only reinforces my wonder that we have transformed time from the local true time to something that is delivered from a distant location and that is nearly always wrong.

They say that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Ironically, our highly synchronized clocks, now tied in to official timeservers by high-speed internet connections, are almost never right.

It's commonly thought that in olden days, time was set by solar noon, the point at which the sun is highest in the sky. Not really true, because it was understood early on that the earth actually rotates 361 degrees each day in relation to the sun, making the solar day a very inaccurate time reference (not to mention the difficulty of measuring the position of a disk that takes up such a large space in the sky and blinds you as you stare at it -- leading to the stereotype of the squinty-eyed sailor). Instead, astronomers adopted sidereal time, measuring the earth's rotation against the night sky, setting a day according to a normal 360-degree rotation. As the use of accurate clocks and watches spread widely in the 19th century, it was common for local jewelers and clockmakers to keep the correct time: local sidereal time. These merchants often were, or were assisted by, amateur astronomers, armed with star charts from Europe and the established reference of the Greenwich observatory, who would frequently set local time with a fair degree of accuracy. So here in Albany, the local watchmaker on Pearl Street was where you went to find out what time it was. And if you took the train to Syracuse, you might step off the train and go across the street to another jeweler to check the time, because it is about 9 minutes earlier in Syracuse than in Albany. That's how time really works: it's tied to your longitude, and even a small distance on the planet can make a significant difference in what time it is.

Came the telegraph, railroads and professional astronomers, and the case was made that for the sake of safety, to prevent rail collisions in the days before electric track signaling, trains should all run on the same time. In 1883, the railroads adopted the Standard Time system, breaking the U.S. into four time zones. (Standard time wasn't established by federal law until 1918.) Most major cities, highly dependent on the railroads for the flow of commerce, adjusted their official time to railroad standard time. Suddenly, when it was noon in Boston, it was noon in Detroit - a convenience, but a patent falsehood, as these two cities are 47 minutes apart. But standard time was universally adopted, and became more and more important to commerce as communications sped up and the world got smaller.

In the early days of personal computers and the web, one of the exciting things was that you could suddenly get highly accurate time through your computer -- much easier than placing the call to the local time and temperature line and then walking around the house to set your clocks, guessing how long it had been since you got the time as you moved from room to room. It used to require a program; now it's built right in to the computer, the phone, the cable box, the Playstation. There's perfect standard time all over my house - and it even adjusts to the lie we tell ourselves, daylight savings time, to enjoy longer summer evenings. We've transformed from having highly accurate time in the 19th century to being completely wrong in the 21st.

So we still commonly think that noon is the point when the sun is highest in the sky (which it is, if you're talking about solar noon) -- but solar noon here in Albany, during daylight savings time, is at 1:04:10 PM. Solar noon in Detroit is at 1:41:31 PM. But if I'm on a phone call with someone in Detroit, at noon today, we'll both get on the phone at the same time and the sun won't be near its highest point in the sky. Our time is highly accurate and completely wrong.

 

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Yes, you can share your iCal information without paying Apple.

I don't know why sharing iCal calendars is so difficult. Apple has always defaulted so that you can only do it easily through their paid service (formerly .Mac, now something called MobileMe). There used to be some other sharing services around that made it easy, but many of them have disappeared, and all the other fixes seem to involve running a script or a client on each machine you want to share it with. We needed to create a new calendar today and my free iCal hosting service was once again giving me trouble, so I finally got around to figuring out how to do this on my own service. Turns out? Not that hard.

Mimeographing services. For decades, mimeographing reigned supreme as the cheap, easy way to make quality copies of printed materials, and every office of any size had one. A typist would set up a stencil, which would then be attached to a spinning drum. Ink would be squeezed through the stencil and onto the sheet of paper. They're now often confused in our nostalgic minds with dittos, the fragrant medium of school tests that also went by the name of "spirit duplicators." Dittos worked more like offset, with a mirror-image wax-coated master that printed where the wax wasn't, usually in a purple ink. Both technologies suffered a bit from the rise of the Xerox-style photocopier, but were truly put to death by personal computers and printers. They are still in use in the developing world, apparently because they don't require electricity.

You don't see a lot of typewriting services, either. And the bottom dropped right out of the multigraphing market.

If, like me, you spent a significant part (though hopefully it won't turn out to be the majority) of your life in the 20th century, you may share an unreasoned love of typewriters. I got rid of my last typewriter, a lightly and lovingly used IBM Selectric, back in '95, once it was clear that I would never again want to cast a keystroke that wasn't captured in the e-world. But that didn't dim the romance of keys, carriage and bell, and the entire industry that grew up around it. My long-time home of Syracuse was the original home of Smith (later Smith-Corona) typewriters, as well as at least three other typewriter factories. Typewriter money built three of Syracuse University's landmark buildings. I still have a beautiful Remington Noiseless, proud product of the Remington factory in Ilion - I fell in love with it at a junk shop on the west side of Syracuse and walked its heavy frame through the slums to get it home. It still serves a decorative purpose, a rare beauty that carried two sets of characters on each striker, but my dream of finding a second one for parts and getting it back into working order is a dream deferred.

So if you share this love that dares not carbon copy its name, you'll appreciate this wonderful site: The Martin Howard Collection of Antique Typewriters. These are marvelous creations from the earliest days of typewriting, before QWERTY was the rule, and every one is a gem, a technological dream from another time. Please to enjoy.

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Sorry to all the folks who took the time to comment and then wondered if I even cared. Your comment is very important to me. No, really it is. Not sure what Movable Type setting I had screwed up. It's supposed to send me an email when there are comments pending, but I got nothing. Also, if you have trouble commenting, shoot me an email and let me know. It's supposed to accept pretty much every ID system out there, and will even let you comment with just an email address. I'd turn off moderation, but you cannot believe how many spam comments I'm getting already.

Having only recently moved into the wonderful world of having an up-to-date operating system, I'm still playing catch-up on capabilities. I went from Tiger on my old G4 to a short stay on Leopard on the new Mac Pro, and now Snow Leopard on the Pro and the new iMac. And I keep finding little surprises I didn't even know it could do. For instance, all of a sudden, QuickTime will make and save audio, video and screen recordings. When did that happen? Last I had checked, you had to buy QuickTime Pro, which I never did, and used about 14 different programs to work around that need. (Downside: it still won't record streaming audio, for what may seem like obvious copyright reasons.)

This morning's new discovery?

Almost in the sense that the site isn't what I'd like it to be yet, but the blog itself is back up and running. Transitioning from Blogger, which dropped its FTP support, to Movable Type, which I had wanted to do a couple of years back and just didn't figure out at the time. So, here's the deal, and maybe how to do it if you need to.

I don't normally do tech talk here, but on the chance this will help someone else, I'm going to put up the most boring post ever. (Well, in the top 100, anyway.) There have been trials and tribulations resulting in a new computer, which also meant a new operating system, moving up to Leopard (10.5). For the most part this was smooth because it's been around a while and programs have been updated and all is peachy keen. But it also came with brand-new Snow Leopard (10.6) in the box, ready to install, and SL breaks quite a few more things. One of those things is AppleTalk, an old networking protocol that goes back to the first Mac. Probably about 5 people still use AppleTalk, but I'm one of them. And in SL it's finally gone.

Back when we started this whole working from home thing, we borrowed a boatload of money to get nearly the fastest computer thinkable for graphic work – a PowerMac 7100. It came with a 100MB hard drive, an amount we thought, in those pre-digital photo, even pre-worldwide web days, that we could never fill up. The computer and monitor were so expensive (around $4000) that we put off getting a printer for a while, instead driving off to the Kinkos when printing a job was really necessary. (We also went to the corner gas station to fax things, until we got our first fax modem.) When that got old, we took the plunge and bought a fine laser printer, the HP LaserJet 4MP. It prints Postscript files, and it's a workhorse. 15 years of constant use and absolutely no maintenance later, it's still going strong and putting out documents that look as crisp as the day we got it. But as time marches on, it gets harder to keep it connected to my new flashy computers. The last time it broke was when parallel ports went away, on my PowerMac G4 dual. This caused some panic until I learned I could network the printer in through an Ethernet bridge, a little magic box that with a minimum of fuss kept things running the past 8 or 9 years. But it was a magic box that came in through AppleTalk, and in figuring out potential issues with SnowLeopard, I found out that its magic will be gone.

Scouting around for a new solution, I learn that there are cables that adapt parallel port connections to USB (which I'm pretty sure didn't exist yet when I put in the ethernet bridge solution). Notably flaky, but worth a try, and people with the same printer seem to have gotten it to work. So I get a good deal at eBay on a Belkin cable (I don't know what Keyspan is, but people complain about their cables mightily, so I stuck to a brand I've had success with), the cable arrives promptly, and off I go.

Sort of. The Mac sees the cable and knows what it is, but getting documents to the printer is a very chancy thing. Sometimes they go, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I need to restart the printer, sometimes that doesn't work. Flaky. And not productive. So I need a better solution, which is where the beauty of OS X's Unix underpinnings once again shines. (I didn't even need to get into the Terminal or DarwinPorts, and if those words scare you, don't worry about it.) So, if you're trying to keep an old AppleTalk-style printer alive by making it a USB printer, here's what you do:

1. Buy the aforementioned Belkin USB Parallel Printer Adapter.
2. Connect the printer through a USB port (direct to computer or a powered hub; I didn't have luck coming in through the Cinema Display's port).
3. Go here and download usbtb, which provides what is called a CUPS backend for USB printing. This is an open-source project that supports hundreds of printers, and claims to do it faster than OS X.
4. Install usbtb (double-click the "Install usbtb" package). It will then scan for USB printers. Your printer's name may show up, or it may be called "Unknown Unknown," in which case select that. Then you will get a list of printer drivers. The HP LaserJet 4MP is not on that list, so choose its closest relative, the 4M. Quit usbtb.
5. You could be done, but the 4M's driver doesn't provide that Postscripty crispness you've been accustomed to, especially in graphics. So go to System Preferences>Print & Fax, choose the printer you just installed, choose Options & Supplies, click the Driver tab, and now replace the print driver with the 4MP driver (which is included in Leopard and Snow Leopard). And it works. Now you're printing through the CUPS system using an official HP driver, and it all works beautifully.
6. If you've been sharing this printer, you'll need to delete it and then add it again on the other computers. Also, you will continue to see your shiny new cable listed in the Print & Fax list (mine shows up as "Belk USB Printing Support IEEE-1284 Controller") – just leave it.
7. Bonus: By getting rid of the Ethernet bridge, you've freed up space for another transformer on your power strip.

On one of the boards, someone said, "Dude! Just buy a new printer!" Well, why? I doubt that any printer I buy today will work as long or as cheaply as this fantastic machine (which cost about $1000 at the time, by the way), and I see no reason to landfill something that's working just perfectly. I solved this problem for $10, an hour of research, and an hour of experimenting.

I've been mostly offline for the past couple of weeks, a situation that in today's society is akin to being in a coma. It started with a hard drive crash, and all the efforts that are required to restore a computer after a crash. Then it was followed by another hard drive crash, and so I went through all the issues again – except that now I was very short on spare hard drive space and had to start arranging my backups like a tile puzzle, shifting backup files from one drive to another to make room for backups and restorations. I bought 2 new drives, got everything arranged the way I wanted it, made double-sure my most critical information (and it seems like it's all critical) was safely backed up, and was in the midst of backing up the new configuration when

the doorbell rang. Only no one was at the door. Not unusual; our wireless doorbell picks up stray signals from time to time. But the clocks in the kitchen were blinking. And the computer was off. The lights weren't on so if they'd blinked, I didn't notice. But when I went to restart the computer, I didn't get a happy Mac. Or a sad Mac, or a confused Mac, or anything else. Absolutely no reaction. So, despite being on a surge protector, a power surge had fried my old G4.

Now, this old machine owed us nothing. It was a G4 dual processor 450 mHz, nearly nine years old hopelessly antiquated in a lot of ways (streaming video, for instance, could hardly be called "streaming" on that machine), and yet still surprisingly capable. I could still run iTunes, Photoshop, Word, Firefox, Excel, Mail and everything else all at once, and it really didn't suffer too badly. It had been useless for games for years, but that's what a Playstation is for anyway. But it had certainly served us well all these years, and I was genuinely shocked it was dead.

So the choice was to go cheap and get an iMac that would be wickedly fast by G4 standards, but would have limited expandability, or go top-dollar and get the Mac Pro Quad Core. Well, based on the lesson learned from buying at the top of the range the last two times, my third Mac in 15 years is the Mac Pro. It does some things, like importing images, so fast I get whiplash looking at it. Even the inside of the box is sexy. And while I anticipated spending another several days getting all my old files back in order, Apple's Migration Assistant put all my files in place, including my mailbox settings, in about an hour. An hour. It was incredible.

So let's see if this big shiny aluminum box (even bigger than the G4) goes for 9 years.

Way back when I first learned about computers, about 1's and 0's and bits and bytes ('cause we weren't really into kilobytes or megabytes then, and a terabyte would still be something you'd only expect from a pterodactyl), back when we punched programs onto paper tapes before running them through phone lines to a distant mainframe, when there were no monitors, just paper output – way back then, when I learned that a single misplaced digit could ruin my afternoon, I wouldn't have imagined that decades later it could ruin a lot more than that. A tiny little hard drive failure, not enough to cause the disk to completely fail but enough to make it unmountable – most likely just a little bit or byte out of place somewhere that I can't find to correct – and my weekend and the beginning of my workweek are toast. My startup drive suddenly froze up on Friday, just after I'd saved a couple of documents I really didn't want to lose. My pictures were safely off on another drive, and everything except that afternoon's work was backed up, so it should have been the mildest of inconveniences – except that it's the startup drive, so all the system data and mailboxes and preferences and everything else that keep my electronic life running smoothly are on there, and not on anything else in a bootable form, and so arrrrgggghhhhh.

That was just a week after another drive failed (again, having been faithfully backed up), and while the system disk didn't owe me anything (installed in 2002), it is much more of a pain in the ass to lose.

While the periodic Revolt of the Appliances marched on, the toaster decided to throw in with this lot and see what came of it, but rather than causing agony and hand-wringing and careful planning for restoration, the toaster's revolt was met with swift justice – out with it. A new one was procured, and one of the options had a digital read-out. For toast. At this point I'm not taking any chances on these devices getting together, so the analog choice came home with us and, by all accounts, makes toast.

Meanwhile, backups of backups as I reconfigure, reload, etc., and get a new set of drive arrangements in place. I need to decide whether I'm going the extra mile with the old drive to rescue a few files, but that decision will likely be made when the new drive arrives tomorrow, and it ends up taking its rightful place alongside the toaster.