Bug-Man’s Blog

Before I start, “STEVE JOBS JUST DIED” was the first message posted to the hijacked macrumorslive.com feed, and while it was funny for a few minutes, I soon got very annoyed at the sheer idiocy of the hijackers. This particular feed is, usually, the best one to follow, so it was a shame that it quickly became worthless.

The surprises from Apple this year were not that exciting. New iWork stuff including iwork.com for online office work, which seems to be a big thing lately. Apple, Microsoft and Google are all doing it. It may be interesting to see what comes of that but Apple’s online services have been of very little interest to me so far, considering how little Mobile Me does for me at the moment.

iLife ‘09 — about the only useful part of this package is iPhoto, if you even use it. The main problem with iLife is that you need to buy it as a whole package, even if you don’t want iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. And I don’t. I’ve used iMovie before, for a while, but that was in my YouTube hey day.

Until recently I have been keeping my photos in a directory structure on my computer (backed up of course) and not used any particular software to manage it. Even more recently I was toying with Aperture. Now the Keynote came out with all of these cool-sounding features in iPhoto that I WANT!

A library that allows you to organise by event/place, facial recognition that will find faces and let you tag who they are, then intelligently guess who it thinks faces belong to in your other photos. But not only that, there is Flickr and Facebook integration which means that if anyone tags anyone else in your photo, that tag is instantly downloaded and merged into your library. I’ve often found having your own private meta-data that isn’t compatible with other systems most annoying!

I’m quite interested in this facial recognition stuff, and I really want to see what it’s all about.

Geotagging - again, totally cool and being used more and more. I’m eager to play with iPhoto ‘09. Sadly, Apple does not offer a trial version if iLife, so I’ll be waiting to play with it by some other means, and hopefully these features make it to Aperture quickly!

On other notes, the MacBook Pro 17″ with the new unibody is not much of a surprise, not not of great interest to me because I don’t use the 17″. No news on iPhone, and some stuff about iTunes store, which I don’t use very much for music at the moment. At least there’s a general price reduction on music and it’s now DRM free. Yay!

So Apple won’t be at the next one, so what does that mean for next year?

And here’s what you don’t do if you don’t want your live feed to get hijacked during the MacWorld Keynote…

I am looking forward to it this year, and one rumour out there is that Apple will be releasing some sort of home server device. If they do, I will be pleased, as I’ve been looking for something good for a long time now and there’s not very much out there. I will be concerned if it’s over-priced though, because Apple products often are. I just want something that lets me insert many disks, choose a RAID type and set up shares and permissions. Ideally something that let you start off with a few disks and add more in to increase the RAID set over time would be ideal. I will just wait and see.

The MacWorld Expo 2009 is between January 5-9 this year, so there’s not long to wait!

Finally, what is the http://www.macworldexpo.com/ website doing running Microsoft’s IIS?

The proof is in the pudding!

Our household’s Apple product collection seems to be increasing, though some are becoming redundant now.

2x Apple iPhone 2G 8GB
1x Apple iPhone 3G 8GB
1x Apple iPhone 3G 16GB
1x 64 (I think?) GB iPod Classic
1x iPod Shuffle
1x MacBook Pro (2007 series)
1x MacBook Black (2007 series)
1x Mac Mini
1x 1TB Time Machine + Airport
1x Airport Base Station
1x Bluetooth Mighty Mouse
1x Bluetooth Keyboard

I think that’s it, anyway!

I trialed MobileMe when it came out and I didn’t find it useful. When the trial subscription was coming to a close I made sure that I jumped on to the Me.com website and cancelled the trial. “Your credit card will not be charged” says the website. Adam leaves happy.

Lo and behold I check my bank account details and I’ve been charged £59! I checked it out and sure enough, it’s a charge for “17 Nov APPLE COMPUTER INTL INTERNET GBR 59.00″.

I was able to log in to the service with my old details however, I had thought that it was cancelled, so shouldn’t my account and password no longer work anyway?

I checked on the Mobile Me help website and you are able to cancel your membership with a full refund within 45 days, so I logged in, went to account details and cancelled my subscription. Their website did say my credit card would be refunded. Unfortunately they don’t give you an opportunity to explain in words why you have cancelled your membership and I am still going to write to them to find out how this happened, as I am unimpressed!

I sent the following to Apple:

Hi Apple,

Sadly I have lost a little faith in Apple after my experience today.

I’ll wait and see how it goes!

Well I wouldn’t call myself at mid-life yet, but I definitely had a crisis. This house has got a few different storage devices at the moment, including a Western Digital MyBook 1TB (it sucks, which I may explain in a future post!), a new Apple Time Capsule, 1TB, as well as a couple of other hard disks floating around.

I decided to reinstall my MacBook Pro the other day because it wouldn’t install the 10.5.3 update properly, and I had also recently installed some software which didn’t remove itself properly and tainted the system. I thought it would be a good opportunity to clean out the cobwebs. I carefully backed up my data however, due to a bug with the Western Digital MyBook which causes it to stop with a “permission denied” error and requires you to reboot it, I was having trouble backing up. The bug is so annoying that you have to carefully check what has been copied and what has not, because the only method for copying you’ve got is Samba.

Anyway the fact of the matter is, I backed up my photos carefully. The Time Capsule wasn’t in use yet, as it was new, and I decided to start doing regular Time Capsule backups AFTER the fresh Leopard install. Anyway, it was over a week ago when I performed this backup and with all the issues and what with having a new Time Capsule and all the issues with the MyBook I couldn’t remember which device I’d ended up backing up to. I was confident it was the Time Capsule because of the broken MyBook but alas, when I went looking for them tonight I couldn’t find them anywhere! After looking everywhere around on my MyBook and the Time Capsule, my heart sank. I couldn’t find my damn photos anywhere and I realised that I may have just lost 10Gb of photos and many, many months worth of snaps. I was so upset when suddenly I remembered my iPod! I had backed them up to my iPod! Oh wow, I was so relieved.

Lesson #1 - BE CAREFUL when you’re doing this kind of thing!

Lesson #2 - Get an Apple Time Capsule or an external hard drive and start using Time Capsule NOW. If you don’t you’ll regret it. We so often forget to back up and disk is cheap. When it comes to things like your photos, the couple of hundred pounds spent on backup disks is worth every penny. Nobody wants to lose their memories!

Well as you’d expect, less than 24 hours into the MacBook Air being released to the masses, Gizmodo has taken it apart for all to see. What else would a bunch of geeks do?

The least they could have done was destroyed it! Here are a couple of pics:

It’s also been reported that over the remote disk, you can’t play DVD media, burn a CD or listen to music.

From time to time it’s good to go back and look at a big list of keyboard shortcuts. There are plenty that I had completely forgotten about. I thought it might be a good idea to jot some of them down to make myself a bit of a quick-reference sheet for those that are useful to me.

Please note that some of you on non-Mac platforms may not be able to view the symbols correctly. Also, this is not a complete list. It’s just a list of shortcuts that I deem useful to me. If anyone else has anything they’d like to add feel free to add a comment!

Symbols
Remembering all those keyboard shortcuts can be annoying. Most of what we need is already laid out on the keyboard but not everything useful is there. I’ve just moved to the UK so I need to use the £ key a lot more, but how do you know where to type it in if it’s not printed on the keys? I suppose you have to rely on your memory.

Universal/Finder/System
Some useful universal keyboard shortcuts that help us through our every day.

Boot Up
The keys you can press during a boot-up sequence.

Safari
Useful shortcuts in Safari.

Mail
Useful shortcuts in Mail.

As I mentioned earlier it’s nice to remember these every now and then because some of them can be very useful.

A few other things you may not have known about OS/X:

PS. You should check out www.macosxhints.com frequently!

Oh, how annoying!

There is a bug with OS/X’s Spaces in which windows will disappear. They don’t close, they just can’t be accessed any more. I have experienced this bug only a couple of times but according to my friend Justin this is just a temporary problem.

It seems the easiest way to get your windows back is to bring up the Spaces preference pane and restart Spaces. Your windows will all recombine onto Space 1 and you’ll have your access back!

Thanks, Justin!