exporting from keynote 08 to powerpoint 08

I prefer to build presentations in Keynote, but most of the world uses PowerPoint so I often need to export from Keynote. With the most up-to-date versions of each, PowerPoint could no longer open Keynote exports, failing with an uninformative error message if loaded from finder or failing silently if loaded from PowerPoint's File menu.

There is a lot of discussion about this on the Mac forums with little concrete resolution. For me, removing the speaker notes from the Keynote version fixed the problem and my exports worked again.

sad panda mac day

I'm an Apple geek. I can admit it. I've been primarily using Apple laptops for 5 years, own an iPhone and several iPods, Mac Mini's are connected to every television in the house, and I've generally pushed Macs on anyone I knew who was buying a computer and didn't need to play games.

Thus, I am saddened by three distinct Mac problems that tumbled together today.

First, the MacBook Air. Using an Air is a little like having an iPhone several months ago. People who would normally never talk to a stranger in public come up to you and ask about it. With the iPhone, it was easy to respond with a big smile and a loud "I love it!" With the Air, it's a little trickier. For the most part, I do love it. Even discounting the adventure of the my first one arriving broken, it has proven to have enough power to run Second Life, takes up no space in my bag, has a great keyboard, bright screen, enough battery life, stays nice and cool, and -- when everything is working -- has been an absolute joy to use.

Unfortunately, everything doesn't always work. Ironically, it is again an intermittent problem with the trackpad. Unlike the first time, this one is easier to reproduce. If I spend a lot of time with Gmail open in a tab while clicking around in other apps, eventually the trackpad button stops taking clicks. Tapping the trackpad still works and -- here's the spooky part -- reloading Gmail generally restores the click functionality. Alternately, shutting down and restarting Firefox fixes the problem. Oh, yeah, reloading it in Safari generally fixes it, too, so it isn't just Firefox.

Weird, eh? I don't quite have it reproducible enough to add into the Apple bug database, but I'm close.

So, I want to tell people I love the Air, but instead I tend to waffle a bit. Too bad, because it really has recalibrated what I expect from a laptop. I may never go back to a larger, heavier machine.

Second, my Airport Extreme wireless routers at home have been randomly dying. Turns out, there is a lot of unanswered discussion on the Apple boards about this, although several different problems seem to be overlapping. I have two wireless networks set up at home, one for 802.11g/n for guests and the Mac Minis and a separate 802.11n for our laptops. Both are on Mac Airport Extreme N routers. The .11g/n network started randomly failing the other day in a very weird way. The green light would stay on, but both wired and wireless connections would fail, the wireless network would vanish (even iStumbler couldn't find it), and if you tried to ping the router via a wired connection, the host would be down. Cycling power would fix the problem. Eventually it started happening continuously.

I figured the equipment had failed, so swapped routers and temporarily ditched the .11n network. Then it started failing. Since both were next to each other on a high shelf in the corner of the room, I thought maybe I had cooked both routers, so I went and got a new one and installed it in a better ventilated spot.

The new router began failing immediately.

Now I was really intrigued -- where "intrigued" is a synonym for "angry and frustrated." I turned on max logging and started streaming the logs to a wired host, looking for patterns. What emerged was that every failure was preceded by bittorrent using NAT-PNP to setup a route it would lock up the router. That hint gave me the clue that led me, via Google, to the linked discussion. I've tried the voodoo solution of turning off IPv6 support (Manual Setup -> Advanced -> IPv6 -> Local-link only) and so far haven't seen a lockup, but we'll see. Very annoying, as my home network had been rock solid for years.

Third, remember the comment about games? Well, just saw the Instant Action announcement and I want to check out there technology! Sadly, despite being a web plugin, they don't have a Mac version yet, which is too bad.

I'm sure tomorrow will be a better Mac day -- maybe I'll download the iPhone SDK to make myself feel better.

making a hp 3055 all-in-one work with os x leopard over the network

One of the unexpected impacts of being on my own was the need to scan and fax documents. After a bit of research -- not enough, as it turns out -- I grabbed the HP 3055 at the local Staples. I picked the HP because I don't need color printing but do regularly need to scan more than one page. Also, it has an ethernet port, so I could just plug it into my home network.

Alas, while I did peruse Amazon's ratings and comments, I didn't do the critical Google search:

hp 3055 os x

Where the first result is a link to the Apple Support pages where people are complaining that the scan function doesn't work under Leopard. The thread is marked as being solved, but as far as I can determine, they are lying, since the neither solution worked for me.

1. Use older version of HP scanning software
2. Run HP Scan under Rosetta

The Rosetta solution didn't work for me and I couldn't find the older HP Scan software. However, I know that something in Bonjour changed for Leopard, since it caused my Infrant Ready NAS problems as well. What if Bonjour changes are impacting the scan function?

So, if you go to System Preferences -> Print & Fax and click on the "+" to add a printer, under the default option, the Bonjour printer pops up right away. However, if you wait for about 15 seconds, the printer will also show up as a Network Printer. Select that one. Then run HP's Setup Assistant and put in the IP address of the Network Printer and voila, everything works.

Me thinks something changed in Bonjour!

So, to recap, to get your HP 3055 to properly scan under OS X 10.5 Leopard:

1. Use System Preferences -> Print & Fax to remove the Bonjour printer
2. Click the "+" to add a new printer
3. Wait until the Network Printer shows up as an option, then select it
4. Now run HP's setup, reference the printer via IP address

Hopefully this will get fixed for real. Lots of long, angry threads on both HP and Apple's forums.