Category Archives: Apple

I got my new Time Capsule yesterday when I got back to the office and decided to set it up last night. Wow, what I thought was going to be an easy swap turned into a 2+ hour, rebooting pain in the neck.

I was excited due to an AppleInsider article that made it seem like an easy thing to “upgrade” my current AirPort Extreme Base Station to the Time Capsule. Here’s the screenshot that got me excited:

So, it would seem like the software would use the config file from my AEBS to configure the Time Capsule in a similar fashion and I’d be all set up in no time flat. In fact, that’s what it seemed to do before I took it downstairs to plug into the cable modem…

Problem number one was that I had to reboot the cable modem after I swapped the AEBS for the Time Capsule. No clue why, but maybe that’s not Time Capsule’s fault. Took me a few minutes to figure that one out, though.

Problem number two was that no matter what I tried, I could not get wireless off it. Everything was reporting functioning, my wired desktop was connected fine and could access the internet. I could even see the wireless network from my Macbook. No wireless–the connection just timed out every time. After trying everything (new password, no wireless security, different SSIDs), I finally did a full “reset to factory defaults”. That didn’t work either–the Time Capsule never booted up fully. So, I did another full reset, this time by pulling the power cord and holding the reset button as I plugged it back in. That seemed to work and I started over.

So, this time, I tried setting up the Time Capsule as a completely new device on a new wireless network. Worked fine. Until I tried to import my config file from the AEBS to get things like my DHCP reservations and port maps back. When the Time Capsule rebooted, again no wireless.

Finally, I factory reset one more time. Again, the software reset wouldn’t work–the Time Capsule never came back online, so I had to do the hard reset with the power cord. This time, I set it up completely from scratch using the config file (it’s just XML) to copy/paste things like the MAC addresses for my Xbox DHCP reservations. Working nicely.

So, last thing, I go up to try and get my mother-in-law’s computer back on the wireless. I tried to use the feature of the Airport Utility software that allows you to join a wireless client without actually entering the WPA password in the client. No dice. Not only did it not work, but it hung the Time Capsule. I tried to change the WPA password and Airport Utility crashed leaving the Time Capsule (now, two floors down) needing yet another reboot.

All-told, I must have rebooted that thing about 15-20 times and hard-reset it twice during setup. A word to the wise: Do NOT try and use your AEBS config to quickly set up your new Time Capsule.

Apple should have probably delayed Time Capsule and its accompanying updated version of Airport Utility (or not promised it in February to begin with) for at least another month to work the kinks out. It’s working now, but I can never have those 2 hours back and I was hoping to play some Puzzle Quest last night!

Mac Tricks and Tips has a great post listing their Top 100 Essential Applications for the Mac. Some are must-have, some are good, and some I would avoid like the plague (Quicken 2007, why must you suck so?).  Some, I even question the use of the word “Essential” in the article’s title (come on, Aperture? Seriously?), but this list is a nice collection of some great Mac applications in one place.  Of course, the clincher for me was finding GrandPerspective which is an open-source Mac OS X re-imagining of SpaceMonger, one of my all-time favorite Windows utilities.

Here are a handful I have had good experiences with and can recommend:

• GrandPerspective
• Adium
• CSSEdit
• Cyberduck
• VLC
• Audacity
• Delicious Library
• Handbrake
• Pixelmator
• iAlertU (only for notebooks with the sudden motion sensor)
• Carbon Copy Cloner
• Flip4Mac (warning, Microsoft product)
• Growl (comes conveniently packaged with Adium)
• Parallels (if you must run Windows)
• iWork (nearly half the price of the cheapest MS Office package)

Here are a couple that didn’t make the list, but I still love:

• MainMenu
• miniStat2 (a widget and the only one I’ve been willing to pay for – $5)
• TextMate (a must if you do any coding)
• 1password
• Peggle
• and, of course, Safe Eyes (to keep your family safe online)

Sorry I was too lazy to include links to all of them, but all the ones from the “Top 100” list are linked on their site and usually Google does a good job of finding them too.

So, by now the news of Apple’s announcements is all over the interwebs.  I’m not going to give details here, you can find that on all sorts of other great sites (Engadget and MacRumors, to name a few).  I just want to give my quick impressions of the four primary announcements they made.

1. Time Capsule/Airport Extreme HDD – I think this one has potential.  I recently bought the Airport Extreme and it has been nothing but impressive.  It’s the best home router I’ve owned (not that I’ve owned a lot) and it shares my Canon MP500 printer nicely between my always wireless MacBook and the PC.  I’d pay $299 for that great functionality bundled with a 500GB server-grade internal HDD for storage.  I think this has potential to compete with Windows Home Server and be a nice all-around solution for Time Machine backups and syncing multiple computers (Windows and Mac).
2. iPhone/iPod Touch Software Update – I updated the InternetSafety.com iPhone to 1.1.3 minutes after Steve got off the stage.  Even with the potential for many thousands of people updating at once, it downloaded and installed quickly and cleanly.  1.1.3 offers a few new features, but nothing earth-shattering (in my opinion).  Still, it’s nice to see an update that adds features rather than just stopping people from applying the latest hacks, cracks, and custom ringtone apps.  The real shocker was that iPod Touch users are going to have to pay $20 for the update that enables Mail and Notes and the Stock and Weather widgets.  Way to reward your loyal, early adopters, Apple, by making them pay for stuff that should’ve been there day one.
3. iTunes Store Movie Rentals/AppleTV Refresh – This is probably the only announcement that would make me consider spending money ASAP.  The AppleTV just dropped to $229 (sucks to be that guy who bought it over the weekend for $299).  It’s a nice device, but at $300, I felt it didn’t really give you much.  Now, with the ability to purchase content directly on the AppleTV, it seems a lot more worthwhile, and I could see myself buying one eventually.  I doubt I’ll rent many movies from iTS as the prices are a little high for my tastes, but that’s not going to stop a lot of people and Apple will make a killing on it.  I think the content is also slightly less expensive than similar Microsoft Marketplace content.
4. MacBook Air – This was probably the highest octane announcement.  I’m sure it’s something a lot of people are looking for.  Personally, it’s not for me.  The size of my MacBook doesn’t bother me.  The size of the MacBook Pro doesn’t bother me.  If I were going to drop $2000 on a laptop (because, let’s face it, you can’t buy it without at least a few extra pieces that will bring the total up), I’d go for the more powerful Pro with a 15.4″ screen.  That’s me, though.  Additionally, the internet is aflutter with the fact that it has a non-user-replaceable battery.  Personally, I think they’re blowing it out of proportion as by the time the battery starts to die out, most of these same people will have upgraded through at least 2 iterations.  It is one sexy-looking laptop, but it’s not for me.  Oh, and for the record, that’s one of the dumbest names since the Lisa.

So, that’s it.  That’s my summary of my feelings about it.  Overall, it was a pretty good time following it.  I have to give props to MacRumorsLive.com and their coverage.  Engadget went down a few times, but the MacRumorsLive stream kept coming and didn’t even require refreshing.  That was a great experience, guys!  (Not to mention, it was sponsored by MacHeist which I have purchased both years now–great products in that bundle.)

Once a year, Santa Steve emerges from Cupertino and announces Mac goodies for all the good little boys and girls. Today, January 15, 2008, is that day! That’s right, folks. If you didn’t know, this week is the annual Macworld Expo in San Francisco. This year, there is “Something in the air” but so far other than rumors, that’s all we know.

In preparation, I have worn my black “I (Apple) Code” shirt and jeans. I will be following several live-blog pages during the Stevenote address which begins at 9am PT/12pm ET. Engadget, TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog), and MacRumors usually have good ones.

I will post my impressions and thoughts sometime after I have fully digested the event.

I admit it–I’m not big on backing things up. This may be the result of never really having experienced catastrophic hard drive failure (knock on wood). Or, it may just be my lazy, gen-x attitude.

At work, I typically save all important documents directly to a “My Documents” share on the file server (IT takes care of backing that up–thanks, Ron). However, I recently started started using a little ToDo list app that really needed its file stored locally (connecting and disconnecting to the server would just be too much for its “every 5 second” autosave). So, how do I back that up on a regular basis? Combine that with the time I’ve spent this week getting my Subversion repositories properly backing up and I decided it was time for a solution.

I had always heard about how cool Automator is on the Mac, but had never really given it much thought. Is it ever (cool)! I was able to graphically set up a simple workflow to make an archive of my local “Documents” folder. Problem was, my 18GB Parallels VM file is in there. With a bit more Googling and some creativity, I was able to exclude that folder (and a few others). More on that later.

So, now, how do I run this bad-boy without physically opening Automator and running it? This article on MacOSXHints.com came to the rescue. You save your Automator workflow as an Application (or, if you read the comments, an iCal Plug-in) and use the iCal alarming capability to schedule it.

I now have automatic backups running every morning at 2am for my iMac at work. Now, I just need to break down and buy that really big external drive for home so I can use Time Machine to back up my personal Macbook.

If you are a casual reader, you can feel free to stop reading here. The rest is pretty technical details on setting up the Automator workflow.

Now, on to the tricky part. If you are trying to use Automator to specify folders, but want to exclude some sub-folders, you are in luck! It’s not terribly intuitive, but what I discovered is that you needed to include a “Get Folder Contents” before you could filter by name. Note that this example only excludes one level deep. It will not drill into subfolders and exclude those. I suppose you could make it do that, but for me, I didn’t need that functionality and this was much simpler and faster. Here is what I ended up with:

• Get Specified Finder Items – Add your “Documents” folder (and any others you want backed up)
• Get Folder Contents – Apparently, this turns Folders into “items” that can then be filtered. Don’t check the “Repeat for subfolders” unless you really really want to drill into every subfolder and create a giant list–it may take a long time to run and exclude items you didn’t expect to be excluded
• Filter Finder Items – Use the “Name” “Does not contain” filter and just add a filter for each item you want to exclude (in my case I created one for “Parallels” and one for “Microsoft User Data”)
• Create Archive – Creates the zip archive and saves it in a specified location
• Rename Finder Items – I used this to append a date-stamp to the filename
• Copy Finder Items – Last step, copy it to a location accessible by Finder. Fortunately, if it needs to mount a network share (even smbfs), it will!

That is my workflow. Hopefully that will help someone that gets stuck on the excluding named folders step. Automator is really pretty neat and who knows, maybe I’ll find some other great uses for it in the near future!

Malls at Christmas time are never a good place, but I had put off getting my Macbook looked at long enough.  I have a white 13.3″ Macbook and for about the last 4 or 5 weeks, the Superdrive (DVDRW/CDRW) had been ejecting discs about 5 seconds after you stick them in.  I really didn’t want to leave it with them and definitely couldn’t leave it long-term right now (due to needing it for testing at work).

So, I made an appointment over the internet with the Apple Geniuses at the Apple Store at Northpoint Mall.  I arrived, checked in, and a few minutes later, handed my Macbook to my assigned genius.  I explained the problem, he grabbed a disc, stuck it in, it spit it back out, and he asked, “You ready to leave it with us?”

Turns out, they had the part in-store, so he said they’d most likely get it done Sunday morning before the store opened.  I said, “Ok” and walked out Macbook-less.    We left the mall, drove back to our side of town, had lunch and were nearly home when the phone rang.  They were slow that day, so they had gotten the drive replaced already.

So, today, I made the hour drive back over to pick it up.  Great job, Apple.  It was painless (except for the 80 mile round-trip), free (thanks to AppleCare–a sound investment if you buy a Mac laptop), and best of all, quick!  Or maybe the “free” part was best.  One of the store employees (not a genius) claimed it would’ve been about $500 if I’d had to pay for it, but I don’t know that I believe him.  Great job, Apple.  I didn’t have to answer a million questions.  I didn’t have to waste my time and yours while you reinstalled drivers or even my whole operating system.  And, I didn’t have to fight with you over it.  Even your service “just works.”

WordPress is very cool. Ron has been telling me this for years now and while I’ve heard the words he said, I hadn’t really been listening. Now that I’ve toyed with it a bit (read: found and installed a theme and a plugin or two on my own), I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s been right all this time.

So, what does this have to do with the iPhone? I found this really awesome little plugin for WordPress that automagically formats your WordPress site for the iPhone. This goes all the way to formatting the comment section and it looks really nice. It was one PHP file and a folder that contains the theme. That was it. Put those two things in the right place, activate the plugin from your Plugins area of the WP-Admin and you’re good to go!

Check out IWPhone at ContentRobot.com

Actually, not really. This article is actually 8 Reasons Windows Users Don’t Switch. The guy makes some very nice points from the viewpoint of a long-time Windows user who has recently “seen the light.” He discusses the way Windows users think and I found myself (past self) in a few of those reasons. He even offers some very good advice to Apple, Inc. about not “John Kerry-izing” the Mac vs. PC argument by only bashing the competition and not telling people why you are better and some good advice to Mac users to not be so elitist (trust me, it’s hard not to).

The only thing I had to take issue with is his opinion of Vista. I’ve used it some and let me just say there’s a reason many of the OEM vendors are screaming for what Dell got–a “downgrade” path to allow them to sell XP on new machines.

Just check the article out. Be patient, though. His article got posted to Digg and the Digg Effect is in full swing right now as I post this.