Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘software’

So i upgraded to 3.1.3 from 4.0…

After a week of annoyances, sluggish performance and bugs i found, got informed of, a solution for the issue. To re-install iPhone OS 3.1.3 instead of 4.0.
Downgrading IS in fact possible and it is happily syncing my music as of this writing.

Using this handy post i was able to put 3.1.3 on my iPhone once more. And supposedly work on a more stable, fast and better OS than Apple promised 4.0 would be.

What will i miss in 3.1.3 that IOS4 has? I can’t think of a single feature. Since i have an iPhone 3G all the good stuff didn’t work anyway so blah!

Time Machine Rediscovered

2 Months or so ago i bought the new 27″ iMac, last summer i bought the then new MacBook Pro 13″.
And both needed backing up.

With the ever bigger harddisks and increasing lazyness when it comes to connecting peripherals to computers i wanted something simple. I have never really backed up any iMac. Just the MacBook as i drag it around to places and thus is more prone to defects. however, with me moving my development files to my iMac and the hassle for IF it goes wrong a backup is just nice to have.

I used to back up my MacBook Pro with SuperDuper, which i bought, and synced an Western Digital 500GB Hard disk with every wednesday and sunday. It was manual and tedious. Too much steps for something i didn’t really want to do. Later i figured out that Time Machine didn’t really need the disk at all times and wouldn’t make a fuss if the disk was not found. I still use SuperDuper regularly for various things and i like it alot. But for a drive that isn’t always there it’s not really what i wanted.

So here’s how i do it now. In iCal i have made a repeating event to make some noise 3 times a week, prompting me it’s time for the backup. Then i simply hook up the drive and let it connected for a bit. And a few hours, or minutes, if i think about it. When Time Machine did it’s thing i simply disconnect the drive again.
I now do that for my iMac too since this week and it’s been really simple. For the iMac with the ports less accessible i bought a Western Digitial 1TB drive that shut’s itself off after a minute inactivity and just leave it connected.

It almost couldn’t be simpler.

So here i am, ending up using Time Machine and even liking it. When it was first introduced i didn’t like it much for it’s lack of options. With some tweaks using the preference pane Secrets even that can be solved. Like setting a longer interval for backups every day or every 12 hours instead of every hour.

Media Center Mac Mini – Software Fail!?

With the addition of the Mac Mini Server i bought earlier this week i now have a spare Mac Mini to toy around with.

A 1.5Ghz Core Solo with 2GB Ram.
Given that my Lacie portable broke just before christmas. Or rather, the controller board of Lacie broke (Like so many other Lacie drives) i did some swapping around with disks here and there and suddenly had a 250GB 7200RPM disk spare.
Earlier today i built that thing in into the Mac Mini. But damn was that fucker noisy! I quickly removed it and after some more swapping of disks it now has a 120GB disk at 5400RPM. Which is dead silent. Yay! Originally there was a 60GB disk in there.

Anyway, i wanted to try out the media center idea i’ve been having for weeks now. So i installed Snow Leopard on that machine, installed Plex and got hopelessly lost in the labyrinth of poorly designed settings. After toying with that for a few hours i didn’t even get to play movies properly. The DTS Sound was broken (which is a bug in Plex for the last 6 or so versions) and embedded subtitles do not work. 2 very much required features. That and the total lack of user-friendliness made me decide to look for something else.

Boxee seems very nice, and it is. Apart from its lack of home screen customization, broken DTS downmixing , missing embedded subtitles and poor streaming capabilities i liked the interface a lot! However, since i don’t want to synchronize the mac with my server but just want boxee to look in my movies folder and stream them on demand. It kinda failed. Mounting shares is easy enough, which strangely goes via SMB and not AFP. But then accessing it in a decent matter is a whole different adventure. Every time i would have to go back to the home screen which has the latest online stuff from other users. Something i want to turn off since i’m not at all interested in it. And then find the share under ‘local’. Which lists a ton of other folders and paths you cannot remove. But are not at all familiar too. Another way is to use the browse feature which kinda lets you wander the harddisk and attached devices (including network disks) but that’s confusing too. So if your data is not local, it’s difficult to find. Add broken DTS downmixing and no support for embedded subtitles and you pretty much have a failed software package.

Another thing that didn’t work out well, despite several sites reviewing the Mini saying it was “totally doable”, is that HD content, say anything 1080i and similar, will not always play smoothly. 720p no problems there, streaming it over a 11g Wifi connection. But 1080i often went with a stutter. I’m not sure if it’s because of the wifi, or because of the CPU. But when i copied a file over it wasn’t much better. Just less frequent. So i guess the CPU is on the edge of being capable playing a 1080i movie that is h.264 encoded with AC3 5.1 sound.

If the Apple Tablet is true…

If it’s true and exists – will i need one? Probably not. Will i buy one? I probably would.

I would want a decent eBook reader to finally replace actual books. And the offering of books should be sufficient ofcourse. Like, every proper book of the past 20 years with more to come. Unlike the video store which still is not worldwide and still isn’t compelling to me IF it were available to me.
Hell, if the software offering is good and the iPhone OS, if that’s what’s it going to run, gets fixed in many ways to work more like OS X i might even consider dropping my MacBook from the line of macs i have.

Software wise?
iPhone OS, which should be rebranded into Mobile OS. Larger keyboard, maybe a numpad on it in horizontal view. Wifi synching and not just to Mobile me, but to my LAN with iTunes or iSync. File browsing capability to some extend. To more easily browse files you make on the device. Like a home folder with a Documents, Images, Downloads folder to start with. iWork should fully work on the device.

Hardware?
Camera on the front. Wifi 11n Networking. 480×720 resolution on a display that’s 4 times the size as the iPhone. 2x as wide and high screen as the iPhone. Touchscreen. USB connectivity like the iPhone has. Bluetooth which allows headsets, mice and keyboards. One USB 2 port for a USB drive. One built-in speaker like the MacBook Air has.

I won’t care for…
3G, the market here is fucked up for it anyway, poor coverage for everyone, high prices for everyone. It’s not worthy yet.

And probably some other things i can’t think of right now…

Is it worth it?

I’m tempted to finally buy Coda from Panic Software. But it’s a tad bit expensive. However, for that amount ($99) i’m getting FTP, SVN, editor, books/manuals on scripting languages and much more neat features that the free Smultron and Cyberduck don’t have. So yea. It is worth it? I could also keep on using Smultron, Cyberduck and buy Versions instead for SVN… But Smultron is no longer actively in development. and 39 euros for “just” an SVN client is a bit over the top i think. Even though Versions is a very nice app. Still it’s too expensive.
Coda is also expensive… But it does so much more. Hell, it even suggests code or tells me if PHP functions are real and how they use while i type them. Which is really neat. Syntax highlighting is actually fast and works properly and overall it feels like a proper app.