A digital radio for the iPhone crowd?

Last summer, I was much annoyed by a publicity campaign by some broadcasters saying "Yes to digital radio". Not because I am against digtital radio, but because it was disingenious. Digital radio is already here. What they actually meant, was, "No to analog radio": They were asking for permission to turn off regular FM transmission so that all listeners would be forced to purchase a digital radio, which in Europe means a DAB radio. Their arguments were mostly wrong, to wit, that DAB means better sound (it does not, DAB is normally sent at a sound / bitrate quality similar to good FM) and we would get more channels (some will, but most only marginally: the proposed DAB band is already full with 16 channels, while I currently get about 13 FM channels and not quite the same ones, many get more.) And, of course, DAB radios are still pretty expensive, more likely above 100 euro than below 50. Multiply that by the number of FM radios you have in your kitchen, bedroom, car or cabin which you will have to replace, for no apparently good reason.

Anyway, the campaign worked and it is decided that FM will be cut off in this country in 2017. That is still some time off, but in spite of my irritation, I decided to experiment a little in this direction. But to make it worthwhile and to mask my DAB annoyance, it would have to be something of real new value; meaning internet radio (which is also digital, but unrelated to closing down FM).

Command-line radio
So, when my fifteen-year old bedside radio started to grow a bit wonky, I started looking around for a "triple radio", FM, DAB and Internet. I already had an internet-only radio that I got while in the US (Grace Digital, $300), but clearly adding terrestial radio was useful. Such triple radios do not of course cover the lower range of the price spectrum, but I wanted to see what was available and how they worked.

The Grace radio works fine, but is not overly user-friendly. It is based on a two-line command-line interface which you control through a wheel dial, navigating up and down lists and "typing" by locating each letter with the dial. For presets beyond the first three, you must use the remote, which by and large does not respond to double-digit choices. Once in a while, however, the radio happily turns itself on and keeps going until someone comes along to turn it off. It apparently did so when I was away on holidays and must have driven my dormitory neighbour nuts, blaring incomprehensible Norwegian 24/7 through the paper-thin walls until I came back and could turn if off. By which time she had moved out.

Anyway, the command-line works, and once you got through the setup, the radio did its job quite well within its limits. Also, as I started looking at ads for internet, DAB and triple radios, they all seemed to work pretty much in the same way, although some had a larger display with four or five lines, all seemed to be based on a command-line interface reminiscent of 2-inch computer screens of the 1980s. Price-wise, triple-radios run from about £100-150 up. Functionally, they allow you to search the radio's [online] database for internet stations by name, country, type of content, etc., and often transfer music over wifi from your PC/Mac, hook up your iPod etc.

Pure Sensia
But scanning through these fairly similar-looking offerings, suddenly one stood out as really a radio for the iPhone crowd: Pure Sensia. A British product, it was also almost the most expensive I found, at £250, but gorgeous, shaped like a rugby ball with the front cut off for a large colour 6-inch touch display. Instead of a dreary LCD line with bluish letters, you get a real menu, a list which you flick up and down like on your iPhone and tap to make your selection. Flick left and right, and different options and gadgets appear. You turn it on and off by waving your hand above the radio (literally). So, I did not actually need it, but I wanted it. Lust won over sensibility. I got one.

So how well did it do in practice? Well, the start was a disaster. After unpacking and turning it on, finding the 16 DAB stations and entering my wifi details, it at once asked if I wanted to install a system update (an internet radio is of course a computer, and updates over the air). This was to improve responsiveness in the touch-screen, which was said to be under par, so I said yes, it waffled away, and then said, "Unable to complete" on an otherwise blank screen. Power down and up again, but no go. The old system was gone and the new was "unable to complete". Reset? Check the manual (online on their website): "Go to the menu such and such on the Settings screen". What settings screen? The only screen was "unable to complete". Never mind, what about the hardware reset switch? Nowhere to be seen. A little hole for the paper clip? There was a little hole, but it made no difference - actually there was just a screw in the bottom of it.

So, checking the online knowledge base, it did have the answer: "If you get the "Unable to complete", download the system update to your Windows PC, attach this by USB cable and run the installer.exe." What Windows PC? This is the radio for the trendy, Jonathan Ive-inspired iPhone crowd, the iMac of radios, and they thought I owned a PC? Well, we do have some on the campus I could access, so I took the radio with me to town. But, no way. The installer is an .exe, and we mundane lab users are not allowed to install .exe files on campus PCs. Well, so. Time to test out the VM Fusion PC emulator with Windows 7 I had bought but not really used (what do I need Windows for? Anyway it takes half an hour to boot and brings the rest of my Mac to a virtual halt, not pleasant). But here, I apparently needed it. But wait, did the Sensia update  run on Windows 7? It was very specific, and yes, XP, Vista or Win 7, 32-bit-version. Since my Mac is Intel, I had installed the 64-bit version of Win 7 (which I probably shouldn't have, seeing the performance, but you can't downgrade easiliy). Would that not work? I emailed Pure customer service, which kindly confirmed that it would not. Only 32-bit.

OK, Win 7 came with both options. I wasn't sure I would be flagged as a pirate since I already had installed the 64-bit, but I tried; opened a new "virtual machine" under Fusion, and installed the 32-bit version alongside the old (they now appear as two different "computers"). Windows has not complained about double-install so far, and lo and behold: The Sensia upgrade installer downloaded. It needed a spcial USB cable, but I had one of that type lying around, so it went away and did install. Bliss, the rugby ball had become a radio again, and not the £250 doorstop I had feared.

Graphical radio
So, now that scare has passed, how does perform? Was it worth it? Yes, it was. The display is divided into three graphical panels, with an icon-based "application bar" at the bottom. On the left, a list of stations (DAB, Internet, Favourites, Search results, etc.) On bottom right, a panel with information from the station playing, and on top right a larger panel with application extras. For installing settings, searching, etc., you get an on-screen keyboard a bit larger than that of an iPhone, which is quite convenient.

The screen thus displays still pictures, but not video, this is a radio! Sometimes it hesitates when I switch apps, I may have to keep my finger steady a couple of seconds before it registers the station I want, and my butty index finger often selects the wrong item in the list. But on the whole, it is quite nice, the list flicks up and down pretty much like on your smartphone, and it definitely has the "Mac and iPhone feeling" of working.

Available DAB (DAB/DAB+) stations of course download on installation, and you can select 30 favourites (from among the 16 in this country...). You can also search internet radio (unlimited favourites) by the usual criteria of country, type, etc. and name. Its selection of available podcasts is good (I use our NRK as test, many podcast apps only list a few of theirs, while Sensia seems to have a full load), and you can save them among your internet favourites. You can search and administer internet radio directly on the screen, or create an account with "the Lounge" on Pure's website and organize your list on your PC/Mac. Apparently if you have several radios from Pure (I don't) they can share the same list of favourites. (Grace, my older internet radio, has a similiar web setup). I wasn't quite happy with Lounge's user friendliness, but if so, do it on the radio directly.

The third part, FM radio, was however a wash-out. The radio found only five or six of my dozen available stations, the rest merged into a sound soup (overlapping sound signals). Further, whenever you go from FM to DAB, the radio crashes and has to be reset. So, best forget about FM here and keep your old set around if you want to listen to stations not available on DAB or internet.

Extra functions
The radio is pretty enough to be in your living room (it really is a rugby ball, sitting loose on a stand), but I needed it as a bedside radio. So, I wanted an alarm clock, on the other hand, I don't like staring at a clockface when I wake up at night. Perhaps a special nit, but I was quite happy with Sensia's solution: When you turn the radio off, the screen goes completely black. If you want to know the time, just touch anywhere on the screen - I can do that, fumbling half asleep - and the time is displayed in huge numerals you can't miss, for three seconds, then fade away. Alarms, of course, are availble of various types. Easy to set, easy to forget to turn off afterwards.

In addition to radio, the Sensia can also play music transmitted over wifi from your Mac/PC (your iTunes collection), assuming of course that the PC has software for transmission. My older Grace as well as my TV should do this, but neither worked from my Mac. The TV manual said I should install something called a "Twonky Server" on the Mac, which I did, but it could not connect. Maybe there were other third-party options, but I left it at that, not terribly important. Sensia uses the same Twonky, and I mentioned its uselessness in my conversation with customer relations. They pointed me to a beta of a new version of Twonky, and lo and behold, this worked! I can now see playlists etc. from my Mac iTunes not only on Sensia, but also on the older Grace radio. But not on the TV, well never mind that. The Sensia can also play sound from the iPod, but only through the iPod's headphone connection, not the dock, so it does not charge the iPod.

Finally, the radio also sports some apps: thus Facebook, Twitter and Picasa, which I have not used, as well as RSS feeds (headlines only, not the underlying news pages). The apps occupy the upper right quadrant, but you can expand them to take up the full screen and give you some more detail. You can type messages on the onscreen keyboard, but I suspect it is not the most convenient place to update your profile. Most useful for this type of device is perhaps the weather report (from AccuWeather). Still, while nice, I don't think the apps should be your reason for buying this radio. But it shows what can be done with an internet radio with graphical interface.

On the whole, while the "iPhone interface" may be dismissed as a gimmick, it is a useful gimmick which makes the experience of dealing with internet radio much more pleasant, and would probably be more helpful in spreading the idea of "digital radio" than any PR campaign. For the moment, Sensia is the only one of its kind, and the price line probably indicates why. But I sure hope this is the way the industry will go. For the moment, I am very happy with the splurge, in spite of the occasional freeze and sputter.

***

UPDATE
In late June, the Sensia received a (non-optional) system update over the air, to version 4. It did install without problems over my previous system 2.4. The update includes some power-saving novelties, in particular that you can now choose its stand-by behaviour between a blank screen, as described and lauded above, and a permanent clock-face display, which may be preferable if you keep the radio in the kitchen or living-room. You can choose between different interface languages, and some icons have been upgraded. The FM reception seems better now, at least it can find ten of my thirteen stations, and with better RDS reception. It still crashes on return to DAB, however, but now only after a minute or two of DAB - then it freezes and then reboots (automatically). You can of course work that way, if you are OK with the two-three minute reboot wait. 

What will the Lion eat?

It will be hard to overlook that Apple has with big fanfare announced a new version of its operating system. Formally system 10.7, it is nicknamed "Lion", another big cat from Apple. What will this mean for unsuspecting Mac users?

It is major overhaul, and many will appreciate the new features brought to the Mac. For older users, the drawback that you can no longer use certain older program, such as Eudora or AppleWorks, will make you want to hold out as long as possible before changing to Lion.

Point One, do I need to change? Answer: No, not until you buy a new Mac. When you get a new Mac, it will only work with the new system. But until then, you can ignore all that follows, if you like.

However, if you use Apple's online service called MobileMe, previously .Mac and iDisk, then you may have to rethink. These services will run for another year, until the summer of 2012, then they will close down and be replaced with the new iCloud. Apple's small print says "some features" of iCloud will require Lion, without saying whether the service itself will be unavailable to earlier systems. Rumour mills point out that at least automatic backup (below) is not possible with older systems. That is likely to affect the current storage facility iDisk, and certainly any new feature of iCloud will require the new system. But it is not clear whether it will also apply to the existing synchronization of iCal, Safari and Address Book. Nevertheless, it is possible that if you want to use these, then you will have to upgrade your system software at the latest by the summer of 2012.

Point Two, can I upgrade to Lion with my current Mac, or do I need a new computer? By and large, if your Mac was bought in 2007 or later, you can install Lion on it, if it is much older it will not work. It looks at the processor chip inside, it must be of the type Intel Core 2 Duo [both 2 and Duo] or newer. This was introduced in 2006, my MacBook of the type "Late 2006" has one. You will see this information in "About this Mac" under the apple menu. It should also have 2 GB memory or more. Notice that you can only install Lion from the previous system 10.6 (Snow Leopard), check About This Mac to see what you now have. If your current machine uses system 10.5 or older, you must first purchase system disks for 10.6 (about $30, mostly), install it, and update it to 10.6.8, before you can install Lion.

Point Three, what is good and positive about Lion? From Apple's hype, lots and lots, this is a major new upgrade. Listening to their demo, it struck me that for "regular users", many of the novelties will just be confusing. If you use existing features like "Exposé" and "Spaces" (I use Spaces a lot), then you will be happy with the many new ways to organize your work. If you have never heard or cared about these, then most of the new stuff in Lion is also also likely to leave you cold.

A couple of things did however strike me as interesting even to the "regular user". One is that, for adapted programs, there is no more "Save" command. The program saves your typing and editing automatically and continuously. If you made a mistake and want to go back to what you had earlier, then you can call up an earlier "version" (a bit like today's Time Machine, if you have used it), have new and old side by side, and pick out what you like. That is useful.

       Another useful thing for some, certainly for me and perhaps others who work partly at home and partly at the office, is automatic syncing of documents. All your saved documents are stored at the Apple server called "iCloud", automatically, so you can just stop typing at home, get up and go to the office, and continue typing where you left off. The doc is automatically saved and synced, so that they are identical at home, at the office, or anywhere else that you sign onto iCloud with your account and password.
      Mind you, that will work only in programs that build in this feature, primarily Apple's own iWork program (word processor etc.). It is not known if e.g. Microsoft Word will join this system, as they are working on their own (paid) online service. Other programs from other companies may or may not work in this way.
       Middle Easterners may appreciate that Arabic is now a system language, so that Finder menus etc. will appear in Arabic. We'll see how far that is implemented.

Point Four, what is bad about the Lion? That is perhaps just as important to spell out, as Apple does not boast about that. And we will not know for sure until it is out. However, it seems fairly certain that you will not be able to use older programs under Lion. Older probably means software from before ca. 2006 or 2007. Such clean breaks happen at regular intervals: to keep a computer compatible with old software gets more and more complicated as time goes on and systems are renewed, so every few years, Apple cuts the cord and says, our system will not "support" (i.e., you cannot use) old stuff any more. The last break was the "Classic" (OS 9) software from the 1990s, which was dropped around 2007 or '08. This change here is more insidious, because Classic software looked quite different from modern software, so we saw clearly what is what, now it is much harder to recognize what will work from what will not. Some upgraders may not even have heard about the loss before they stare at their new computer which will not run their favourite programs.

In short, programs such as these will no longer work:
- Microsoft Word and Office 2004. (You need to upgrade to the 2008 or 2011 versions)
- Eudora email
- AppleWorks
- Canvas graphics program
- Freehand graphics
- lots and lots of games, small tools and stuff you may have installed years ago and has become second nature to your work habits.

Many programs are or will be upgraded (such as Word above) so you need just install a new version. However, the others I mentioned are no longer made or sold, and will therefore never be upgraded to Lion. You will then either have to find a different program that does the same job, or forgo the function altogether. (Remember: this will happen when you get a new Mac, as all of us have to do at some time in the future.)

Each one of us has a different set of software. If you are a recently arrived Mac user, then you are probably not affected, and can happy of mind upgrade to Lion. If you have been using a Mac for more than five-six years, then you will most likely have some or many non-upgraded or non-upgradable software, and should check this out before you move on to Lion.

How do you find this out? Well, the distinction is between "PowerPC" and "Intel" software. This relates to the processor chip in the Mac. These two are actually fundamentally different, and it is a bit of Apple magic that we have been using programs written for the old processor and the new together without noticing the difference. No more. So, you must locate what applications for "PowerPC" you have on your Mac. Quickest is to check here:

Go to About this Mac I mentioned above. There is a button "More Info", click on it. You get huge list with everything about your computer. Find and click on "Applications". After some seconds you get a long list of everything. Click on the heading "Kind", to sort the items for this. You will find three main kinds (in addition to obsolete "Classic", maybe): Intel, PowerPC and Universal. The last is fine, it works both on old and new, and is probably the largest group. But look at the PowerPC group. Most of these are meaningless names, they are support tools and invisible things, some may also refer to older versions that you have not deleted yet. But look through the names and see if you recognize software that you actually use and need. (You can also, in Finder, click on the icon for any suspect program, choose "Show Info", it will say: "Kind: Application ([PowerPC, Intel, or Universal]). The latter two are thus fine). If you see a PowerPC item, check if you already have a newer version installed (re-sort under name to find them in the list), or whether upgrades are available in Universal or Intel versions. If not, you will have a quandry to sort out, whether to hold out as long as possible with the system you have, or you want to prepare for the afterlife of that software already now.

(The webside Roaring Apps also has a large lists Mac applications and their compatiblity with Lion, so you can also check there.)

I suspect that for many people who have used Macs since the 1990s, the sorest point in this list is Eudora. A separate message will therefore deal with this: What do Eudora users do when Lion no longer lets them use their favourite email program?

From Eudora to... Eudora?

One of the best beloved programs on the Mac was the email program Eudora, originally freeware made by the software hero Steve Dorner, later commercially sold by the Qualcomm company. For generations of users, Eudora was our introduction to email, and for many it is still synonymous with "email".

Thus, although the latest version of Eudora (6.2.4) was released as long ago as 2004, many are still using this program and swear by it (or have not bothered checking out the alternatives). However, its epoch may be coming to an end. Eudora 6 is one of the applications that will no longer work under the new Mac system "Lion" (10.7). Even if you hold off upgrading for this reason alone, sooner or later your Mac will break down and you will have to replace it. Then Eudora will be no more. We can't forgo email, so we have to look into alternatives.

There are no lack of such, on your Mac you automatically get Mail (normally called Apple Mail in contrast to other email programs). Thunderbird is popular, some are forced to use Outlook, and there are many others. All do of course the same basic things of collecting and sending your email, although they differ in more advanced stuff as automatic filtering into mailboxes and the like. Which you choose is a matter for another column. I am here more concerned with those who may suddenly find that they are cut off from their old Eudora mail, because their new Mac will not run the program. What to do?

Well, the mail is not lost, of course. Eudora kept its mailboxes as "straight text files", so you find the "Mail" folder inside your Eudora folder, and just open any mailbox in any word processor you like. But then all text as well as technical headers of the mailbox will be one long document of text, not as individual email messages. How to keep the structure?

One option, and the easiest, is to import all your old mail into your new email program. Since Eudora was so common, many or most modern Mac email systems have an "import email from Eudora" option, certainly both Apple Mail and Thunderbird do. For those two (and even for importing into other programs), it may be also be useful to use the Eudora Mailbox Cleaner program. That is a small "applet" that prepares your old Eudora mail for importation, and then copies it into either of those two programs, so that you can just open the new program of choice and find your email. Often the Cleaner does a better job of transferring from old to new than the new program's own import options. (Notice that Cleaner does not run under the Lion system, so you must use it before upgrading.)

Some perhaps useful jargon: POP or IMAP
Another very useful option, if your email account is of the POP type, to change it to IMAP in old Eudora before you change. Then there is no importing required. These may be Greek terms to you, but put very briefly, they are two ways your email server handles your email: In the older POP system, your email is transferred from your server (your "email provider": your university or cable company, or whereever your email account is) to your Mac. Eudora lets you keep a copy on the server for a while, but the main mail storage is on your local Mac. In IMAP it is the opposite, your email is kept on the server. You may and normally do get a copy on your local Mac(s), but the "original" is on the server. In IMAP the structure of mailboxes and folders and stuff is also on the server and thus the same whichever computer you connect from, in POP it is only on your local Mac.

It is up to the provider which system it provides its email in, but many or most now support both options and allow you to choose. You can check which one you use now by going to the menu Special: Settings: Mail Protocol, it will have the options POP or IMAP. Check with your provider before you change that, if you go from POP to IMAP you may have to change the server address and other settings. You can then copy your existing local mail back to the IMAP server. If you do that, it will then be automatically available in whichever new email program you use. POP was most common before and is most likely what your Eudora is set up with, but check, if it is already an IMAP account, switching to a new email program is quite easy. It is also useful when you are not sure which email program you will be settling for, you can test several and switch back and forth with relative ease, as the mail is anyway always on the server.

Email in storage
However, you probably have accumulated lots of email and may want to make a clean break with your new program (thus also for the Imap option mentioned, it may slow down in particular if you have too many messages - more than a couple of thousand - in your In box, and some providers set a quota of how many MB you may store in your account on their server). This was my case when I switched a year or two ago to Apple Mail; I started out with a clean new setup, but still wanted to have access, of course, to my old email. I therefore kept old Eudora around, and opened it only when there was some old information I wanted from that period. That will then no longer be possible  under Lion, so I had to look at a new way to access this old Eudora email in a useful fashion (searching by date etc.)

A possibility recommended by some is to import old Eudora email into a "note archive" program, since I only want to read the email as an archive. One program some recommend is Eagle Filer, which imports Eudora email and presents it to you in the original structure of mailboxes and folders within folders (if you have such). That seemed to work fine, it imported fairly quickly. However, it could not understand the formatting commands in the emails (which you don't see in Eudora, but in Eagle Filer turned up as <blockquote type="cite" cite>Notice: </blockquote> <blockquote type="cite" cite><br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite" cite>1)Make note of..." with the real text mixed in, so it was hard to read. Also, a large proportion of the email had lost the dates, it was all "written in 1904", so it was not terribly useful.

I therefore put the Eagle aside, and since I already had the old mail in a separate mail program (old Eudora), I thought it would be easier to keep that idea, and just find a new program that could read old Eudora mail, but which would not be used for active email. Well, there was no reason to look far: There is actually a new Eudora, called Eudora OSE 1.0, and what would be more useful than to read Eudora email in a refreshed Eudora?

You may wonder why the detour, why not go directly to this new and upgraded Eudora at once? The reason is that it isn't really an upgraded Eudora, it is a completely different email program that has adopted the Eudora name. It is actually a version of the freeware email program Thunderbird (which is part of the Firefox package), but it has been modified to look and behave more like old Eudora, so that old hands should find it useful. According to web sources, its reception has been "less than enthusiastic", it took a long time coming (it is a freeware program, you don't pay, but noone pays the people who develop it either), it has suffered under various bugs and glitches, and it clearly differs in many ways from old Eudora. So, many people have not found it yet to be a worthy successor, and since I only use Apple Mail actively, I cannot either recommend or warn against Eudora OSE as an active email program.

But one thing it should excel in, is to import email from its older counterpart, so that was my second stop. Did it work? Yes, it did, although it took some time. The main problem seems to be the actual process of importing large amounts of mail. I had two different Eudora folders, one at home with a more reduced set of email, 20-30.000 emails or so, and the full archive on my office Mac, with 88.000 emails from 1991 to 2008, and sorted into I think about 600 different mailboxes. Sounds like a lot, but over seventeen years, things do pile up.

Method One: Eudora OSE's Import command
So, I started at home. First I installed Eudora OSE. Since it is an email program, it must have some mail account to refer to, but I wasn't going to use it for new and current email, only for old storage. Thus, I set it up for an old passive mail account I had, and set "never check for mail". You can probably just write in a spurious account or wrong password, as long as you set it to not check that account.

Then, I used Eudora OSE's own Import command and asked for Import from Eudora. It selected correctly the old Eudora Mail folder, and trundled along importing them (it has to change the structure of the mailboxes, so some internal work is needed). But when it finished, it just stopped with a blank dialogue, with a "Next" button greyed out. On force-quitting (after waiting an hour), there was now a "Eudora Import" mailbox, but it was empty, and I could neither delete it nor do anything with it. This corresponds to reports from other users, so this is clearly a common situation. I guessed that size mattered, so I went back to old Eudora Mail folder and moved most of the mailboxes out of it to another folder, leaving only a few items behind, then tried again (evidently, old Eudora was not running at this time). This time it worked: A "Eudora Import 0" folder appeared in the "Local Folders" hierarchy, with the mail I had left there correctly structured. Then, I went back and switched in another set of mailboxes into Eudora Mail, and chose Import again in OSE, which put it in Eudora Import 1 (In, Out, and Junk are recreated, so you get new empty ones for each import folder).

By thus taking the import in steps, I was able to import all of it. However, Eudora OSE was not done: At once I opened it, it started to "index" the mailboxes, and this it kept on for a while. Anyway, I did not want them in the Import 1...n subfolders, so I selected all mailboxes and dropped onto the Local Folder icon in the hierarchy, which again worked fine; now I had the old structure in place in the new program. However, it then started indexing again the same mailboxes it had already indexed before. Indexing is useful, but takes both time and place. My original folder was about 500 MB, but after the index, the hard disk reported about 2GB less space than before. Maybe it will be reclaimed later, and who counts hard disk space any more.


Method Two: Using Eudora Mailbox Cleaner
Spurred on by this, I tried it again at the larger mail folder at the office. Would Eudora Mail Cleaner work better and avoid having to import bit by bit? Cleaner has two "to" options, Mail and Thunderbird, but as I said, Eudora OSE is esssentially Thunderbird, and in fact it keeps its mail in [user] Library: Application Support: Thunderbird. So letting Cleaner import my old mail into Thunderbird would let Eudora OSE access it? Yes, it did. Cleaner did a good job of it, so after it was finished, I fired up Eudora OSE, set it up with the spurious account, and there my structure was in "Local Folders": Again in (a single) Import folder, which I could drop onto Local Folders to get them one step up in the hiearchy (and thus directly under the "Mailboxes" menu, as in old Eudora).

So it trundled on indexing my 88.000. And went on and went on. And stopped. I tried opening a folder to read the mail in it, but no go. Then wait. Then tried another folder, and nothing happened. And then again; the menu line did not budge. But after a bit, I got the list of the first folder I had asked for. All correct, but it had spent this time working on it. So, I went home to leave it indexing overnight. The next morning, it had just stopped. Quit, restarted, and it started indexing again where it had left off, so at least it had not been lost yesterday's work. But it was still quite unresponsive. A bit later in the day, when I checked back (it had stopped a couple of times, but begun again on quit and restart the program), it had frozen, and now it would not restart even after a force-quit. A Crash reporter reported that there was nothing to report. Again and again each time I tried to start the program, so Eudora was apparently lost.

Well, what to do. Again, the email folder was really in a Thunderbird folder, so maybe Thunderbird, the original program, could access it. Download and install. Looks different from Eudora, and happily was so different that it was not affected by Eudora's crash: It opened, and as expected did find and use the mail folders as it should be. However, it was still fairly unresponsive. Unlike Eudora OSE, Thunderbird did not tell me much of what it was doing, but it was clearly doing something of its own. I found that opening a separate Tab in the mailboxes window (Th-bird has such tabs) was useful, keep a welcome message or something in the other tab and switch to that, then back to the mailbox, and there the mail was listed in place. Go to another mailbox, nothing. But click in the other tab and back, and you could read it.

Well, OK, not useful if I must do that for 600 mailboxes. But perhaps Th-bird had cleared up Eudora OSE's problem? Quit one and start the other, and correctly: Eudora OSE came up, and went back to its indexing spree. But at least this time it eventually finished. And now it works, I can get to all mailboxes, and all spring up at once with the content in place.

Good thing: As far as I can, everything has survived. I have not checked every mailbox, but I have not found any mail missing yet (I still have old Eudora and can check if need be). All dates seem to be in place, unexpectedly good (attachments had been moved years ago, so I could not check those). Status had been lost in some mailboxes, so that all mail was marked incorrectly as Unread, but I can live with that. Many messages have even retained their original status of "Forwarded", "Replied to", etc. Eudora OSE is probably not as versatile as old Eudora, but as an archive it will do, as far as I can see. I am not in a hurry to switch to Lion, so I can still get to my old mail with old Eudora, but I will have this year or so to try out the new one as my archive reader, and can compare and check if I find problems.

One thing that was probably linked to my crashes as cause or effect, was many duplicated empty mailboxes. These appear in particular in mailboxes with punctuation in their names, in particular slashes (/) and periods (.). The first is obvious, Eudora 6 allowed slashes in mailbox names, but they interfere with the file name system in OS X, and even Apple Mail has problems with a mailbox called "London / Paris". OSE renamed it "London:Paris", with the content in place, but then added another empty "Londo5673abd980" mailbox. The same with mailboxes with periods like "Berlin, etc." The comma seems to be fine, but the period causes it to create a spurious "Berli098sdf" alongside the correct "Berlin, etc.", this with its period in place. So it is a good idea to rename any such mailboxes in old Eudora before the transfer, whether or not it affected my problems (which I'm sure were mostly size-related), it does not hurt to avoid punctuation in mailbox names. Removing the empty mailboxes was no problem, and was a once-only operation.

So far, it seems to work, then. The main problem is the transfer itself, and if your mail archive is large, you may have to struggle a bit. But it seems to get there in the end, after jumping through variuos hoops, and as far as these first impressions go, it seems that I can use new Eudora as a full replacement for old Eudora in the limited function I had for it, as a reader of old mail. Whether it can replace old Eudora also as an everyday email program for new and current mail, is not something I have tested, but which probably depends both on how advanced your setup is, and on how patient you are to have mistakes corrected (and willing to experiment to get around issues like we have discussed above). Apple Mail of course has Apple's mighty programming machine behind it, but Eudora OSE does benefit from its closeness to the better supported Thunderbird, even if the OSE program itself is likely to have some bugs left in it.

Make your own newspaper

Over the last few weeks, I have increasingly been forced to have opinions about various stuff Middle Eastern. Not just historical, but "have you followed the cables this morning?" Well, no, I'm not a journalist with access to Reuters and AFP. OK, you can read online newspapers for up-to-the minute stuff, but I have shied away from that, most of them just look so awful (in particular Norwegian ones, they must have made a conspiracy to make them all unreadable).

However, pressed by need, I have looked into this notion of "making your own newspaper". If you are interested in the Middle East, here is how I do it:

In Safari, go to the newspaper you trust and would like to have as a source. Navigate to "World News" and see if there is a tab saying "Middle East" in the menu. Go there, and then look in Safari's address field, notice if the icon "RSS" appears at the end of the line. If so, that page "feeds" news or headlines which you can subscribe to. If you see it, select the item under the icon (either "RSS" or "Atom", they work the same way). You are taken to the feed page, where you see just the text of the news items, as it appears in the feed.

You can subscribe in various ways:
- You can create a bookmark for that newspaper's RSS page, the one you are in now. Then you can later manually go back there, and you will have an updated list of Middle East news that appeared in that newspaper. Some journals post the full text, others just a line or two, with a link to the full item. Safari lets you do stuff like sorting the items on the page by date and title, how much of the story you want to display, etc. You can also search within the articles. If you save several feed bookmarks to one Safari folder (sub-menu), you can display all items from all feeds on one page. (Firefox etc. do things a little differently, but also provide special RSS functions)

- You can also instead read it in Mail. In Safari, go to a feed page you like, and click "Subscribe in Mail". Mail will then display a mailbox header "RSS", and you will find your newspaper feed in there. Again, just the text, and either the full text of the news article, or just a link to the newspaper's web page so you can scan and read what seems interesting. One advantage with getting them in Mail, apart from the fact that you are being updated continuously without any action on your part (but can ignore the RSS mailbox until you are ready to check it), is that you can use regular Mail actions on them. E.g,, you can set up a Smart Mailbox to read simply "All of: Message is of type RSS; Message is Unread", to get all new items collected; or "Message contains: Kuwait", to pick out just those news items that concern your particular area of interest (if the keyword is listed in the headline or teaser that is sent to you).
You can choose to get news feeds appear in your Inbox, and it looks like emails (except for a blue header on all items), but technically it is not, the items are not sent through your email provider, but directly from the newspaper website to Mail. Therefore, if you have set up Mail to synchronize between e.g. home and office Macs with an imap account, these RSS feeds will not synchronize (but the smart mailboxes will: so they will be empty on the other machine). You can of course set up subscriptions to the same feeds at home, but the read/unread status will be separate on each machine.

- To synchronize, you may instead want a separate news reader that does that. There are probably several solutions, but one that seems almost standard is Google Reader (reader.google.com). You need a Google account for this, I believe, at least I hooked up with mine. You then add feed subscriptions (addresses from the feed pages you've found), and Reader will then collect news items from them. You can see each feed (each newspaper's stuff) separately or together, as a list or the full items; you can see just new (unread) stuff or all stored news, you can search (from the newspaper's archive, long before you subscribed if available), and you can do stuff like mark and share individual items. As this is all stored on Google, it is all synchronized whatever machine you read from.

- This is also convient for iPhone / iPad consumption. There are many RSS apps, and most of them synchronize with Google Reader. I use one called Reeder (about $3). You organize the subscription of sources etc. on the web in Google, in the app you just sign in with your gmail name when you set it up. Then, whenever I open it, it collects new items (just unread or all, your choice) from Google Reader and displays them, so you can just continue where you left on on your Mac. Thus, web and iPhone works well together with Google Reader. You can of course also combine Google and Mail subscriptions, but then the read/unread status of the items will be separate, of course.

In sum: I now susbcribe to about ten international journals who have Middle East pages: Guardian (I think the best in number or articles), New York Times, CNN, BBC, Independent, Le Monde, al-Jazira, al-Masri al-Yawm. In the current crisis, that provides about a hundred articles a day on Middle Eastern stuff, hopefully that will become more manageable when the conflicts simmer down. Of these Guardian and Masri al-Yawm provide full-text articles I can read (or skip) directly, the others provide links which makes it quick to run through the list and pick out those worth reading. I end up reading more of the Guardian stuff, however, because it is just there. In any case, with these sources, I get a pretty complete overview of what happens as it is reported. So, using this stuff, it is starting to feel like I really do have a fairly good in-depth personal journal of Middle East.

The key is of course that your interest coincides with the newspaper / news source's organization, so that there is a separate RSS feed for the area of your interest. There are probably not separate feed pages for "butterflies" or "vikings". You would then have to find the closest general source, and use searches or smart mailboxes or similar to pick out your particular interest, if that works. And, of course, proper blog systems always do automatic feeds (thus also this one), so you can also use the same procedure to follow new items on blogs you find interesting.

The Middle East feeds I currently follow:

The Guardian
 
New York Times

Al-Jazeera English (Middle East)

BBC News 

CNN.com

LeMonde.fr

The Independent

Al-Masry Al-Youm: News from Egypt
 

MacManor - the blog

In the venerable computer journal Byte  in the 1980s, the science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle had a page at the end of each issue called "Chaos Manor", where he wrote entertainingly about all the computer stuff that ended up on his desk, all the problems they created, and how he used them productively or not for what he as a writer needed. Well, he was a very techno-savvy writer, and I cannot say that I get loads and loads of stuff dumped on my desk to be tested (and happily so!) But I stole the name for an occasional blog based on the same principles; musings about things that I come across that relate to Macs, iPhone, or other stuff that I own and use, with perhaps suggestions for how to get around hurdles or stuff.

Thus, user-oriented and when something happens, which may or may not be often, based on my needs. So, who am I? Not a computer person at all, I am a professor of Middle Eastern history at a university in Norway. Originally skeptical to "techno-driven history", I got my first computer, a Mac Plus, in late 1986, and have since been looking particularly at how a Middle East academic could use it: writing in Arabic, transcription and such. That is now stored on a set of web pages for that particular purpose: www.smi.uib.no/ksv. I don't do things like programming, editing movies, or poking around inside computers (more than I have to) for boosting chips or stuff. A middle-aged professor who likes his Mac, but really for fairly pedestrian purposes.

Since I am to write about my own experiences, this is the setup I use and write about: An 20" iMac provided for me by my employer at my office, a regular MacBook at home, hooked up to an external screen and Bluetooth keyboard and mouse; all these bought in 2007 and meant to last two or three years more, and since last fall, an iPhone 4 (previously a 1-gen iPod Touch). No iPad, currently I have not found any reason to drag one around. Perhaps I will be tempted later, but now I prefer to read what books I read electronically on my iPhone, because it is always with me, unlike an iPad I would have to plan to carry with me for just a bigger screen than my iPhone.

So there it is. If readers have better ideas or spot out mistakes or inefficient solutions in what I write, that is what the comment field is for, please use it! But notice that my preferred audience are people like myself, "regular users" of more (or even way more) than 30 years of age, who want to be better at what they are already doing, be it writing, teaching, or getting useful stuff out of the net. Or figure out why this thing suddenly stopped.