Apple

My New Monitor

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After searching far and wide for a good deal on a monitor I ended up ordering a Dell 23″ LCD. I got a nice discount and it was the right size for me. It also offered DVI & VGA inputs. I got it yesterday and it looks great on my new computer table add on. I am finally using Outlook the way it was intended (full screen with a nice big 3 pane setup so I can see everything).

Now all I need for the perfect computer setup is a better mouse and keyboard for my Thinkpad. I just got a Microsoft Wireless Laser mouse for my Macbook and it is really nice. Moves really smooth. I might get another one for the Thinkpad, but I can’t figure out what kind of keyboard to get. I love the Apple Wireless Keyboard I use on my Macbook, but I don’t think it will work with a Windows machine.

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The Weirdest Technial Problem

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On 2nd I wrote about a weird issue regarding my iPhone resetting. Unfortunately since then the issue happened on two other occasions. By the 3rd issue I decided to call Apple and open a ticket on my problem. They couldn’t help me much on the phone so they wanted me to bring the phone in and see someone at a local Apple Store. This is when things get interesting.

A few days before the 3rd incident with my iPhone I noticed that one of the external USB drives I have threw an error when I booted up the Macbook. I was bad and kind of ignored the error since I could see the drive mount and didn’t appear to have any issues. After a few reboots with the sam error I actually read the error and noticed it was warning about a corrput file system. Since this drive was a backup drive and only used as an archived copy of data I didn’t need the data I decided to pull the drive and use a spare I had. The next time I rebooted my computer Sunday night I got the same error, but this time it was on another 750 gig USB drive I had plugged into my Macbook. This time the error was on a drive that I do use and have critical data on. I was not hugely worried since I could still read the data on the drive. I decided to copy the critical data off onto another 750 gig drive that I decided to use as a mirrored copy of the data on the first drive.

Once I moved all the data off of the damaged drive, I formatted it and prepared to mirror all the data on the 2nd drive back over to it. I started off a replication of the good drive using Synk and then went to bed. This was the same night I called in the iPhone for support. I woke up the next morning to find that my Mac had crashed and never copied very much data. Once I rebooted my Macbook I noticed that the one good drive I had was now not visible in OSX. I checked the disk utility and I saw the drive but it was not available. A verify failed telling me the file system was messed up. I began to panic a bit. All my efforts to create a good backup process ruined by some weird fluke issue. At this point I had to take my Macbook and goto work.

After work I went to the Apple Store on 5th Ave and told the Genius Bar guy my woes. He looked over my iPhone and then my Macbook. After explaining what happened to my USB drives they decided that I can hold onto my iPhone but that they want to take my Macbook in to run some tests on.

Now I am without my Macbook, my iPhone works but has no media on it. I was instructed to reset it again, but not restore it. I am waiting to do that when I get my Macbook back. I can’t install anything without all the data on it. After a bit more panicking about the lost data on my hard drives I am feeling a bit more optimistic. I am using Data Rescue II to pull the data off my bad drive. It is taking ages to copy but so far I have been successful. I am about 70% done with my restore. I think the most critical data is already restored onto my good drive. Once I am done I will format the bad drive and mirror the data back over to it. I will then do what Jayson does and physically unplug the backup drive and sync it every week or every other week. Longer term I am looking to get another Drobo or some sort of other solution that does some sort of RAID.

While I wait for my Macbook to return I am not off the Grid. I am using my iMac I typically use for TV, and I have my work Thinkpad.

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iPhone 3G Reset

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My afternoon today was thrown for a bit of a loop when I tried to go out today and tried to play some music on my iPod. There wasn’t any. That was odd since I always have about 8gigs of music on it. I then went to sync it up again with my Macbook. That is when things got interesting. I kept getting an error saying the phone couldn’t sync and I had to reset it. I figured a quick reset and I should be good to go. Well that didn’t work either. I reset the phone and then it kept giving me an error. I couldn’t sync it, or boot it up. An Apple KB article said to reboot the computer so I did that. After about 3 more tries the phone reset and started restoring.

This is the problem with one converged device. I almost can’t go anywhere without it. It is my phone (only one except Skype until I get my blackberry from work). It is also my music player, and PDA. I am sunk if it doesn’t work. Today was a perfect example of that. 3 hours later I am back and semi running with the phone. My only lingering issue that I know of is my icon’s are all in the wrong order. I am more concerned with the fact that I don’t know if this will happen again, and I have no backup plan. I guess that is my operations mindset going. I always need a “plan B”. I am thinking about that, but for now I am just happy things turned out as well as they did. It could have been allot worse!

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13 Days With an iMac

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As my bad luck would have it I went out and bought a 24″ 3ghz iMac the weekend before the announced the new Macbooks. Now I admit I knew they were going to announce new laptops. It wasn’t really a secret. At the time I had given up hope that Apple would come out with a regular Macbook that could use their 30″ displays. I gave up on an affordable solution to have a 30″ display. I wanted the display but didn’t need the Macbook Pro, or Mac Pro that I would need to own in order to run the display. Since my new job gave me a laptop that I need to use for work I didn’t really need my Macbook as much so I settled on the cheaper option of the iMac. I gave up on the larger screen but got a more powerful desktop.

So when the new Macbooks came out and could solve my original requirements I was not happy. I had already owned the iMac. This was of course the week I was out of work sick. I was contemplating selling the new computer for a loss on ebay and just getting the Macbook. I didn’t realize that I could return the iMac to the Apple store and just pay the high restocking fee. I opted to pay the restock fee since I could never sell the computer for what it was worth. I returned it with 1 day to spare on the 14 day return policy. I went ahead and picked up the low end aluminum Macbook. I thought about the more expensive one, but the hard drive space wasn’t an issue. My extra $400 would get me 400mhz in processor. As much as that would be a nice boost, it wasn’t worth the money. Instead I spent a little over $200 and upgraded the unit to 4gig’s of RAM and put in a 320gb 7200RPM hard drive. For less money I than buying the higher end laptop I think I speed up the unit more by getting a better HDD and RAM.

I just finished upgrading the new hard drive today. It was a as simple as running Carbon Copy Cloner on my old drive to a USB drive. Then I booted to the USB drive after installing the new 320gb drive in the laptop and ran CCC again in the reverse direction. The process took several hours to copy the data, but only required my interaction for a few minutes. When I was done my entire computer was cloned onto the new hard drive. I could never do something that cleanly with Windows, trust me I have tried over the years.

The only downside to note is yes I can use a 30″ Cinema Display with the new Macbooks, however the cable that will allow me to do that is not yet available or backordered that it will take several weeks to get. That means I am still on my 23″ display until I can get the cable and buy the new display. Why is going from 23″ to 30″ so important? My eyes aren’t the greatest, so the more screen that I can get the better!

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Teleport

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The ablity to teleport would be a nice to have, but in the mean time I will stick with the Mac application Teleport. Sorry I couldn’t think of any other segway! Teleport solves an annoying problem I have had for a little while. I have setup my Macbook (without a KVM) on one part of my desk, but since I got my 20″ iMac a few months ago when I am not using it as a TV (almost all the time) it is on a portable table near my desk. I have had two keyboards and mice at my desk for a while. That was annoying. Now that I am working from home a bit and sitting using my laptop screen was killing me I setup a spare 19″ flat panel I got from my dad also. Three displays / computers setup near each other is great, but 3 keyboards and mice are not. Now with Teleport I can control my iMac with my main keyboard and mouse from my Macbook. It works great and took a whole 2 minutes to setup. I could have used an open source tool to control both my Mac’s and my Thinkpad, but I would rather have a dedicated setup for my work computer anyway.

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Task Management

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For the past few years I have been trying to find the perfect solution for task management. I try to follow the Getting Things Done model for organizing my “stuff”. Even before I followed GTD I tried different tools for task management. For years that simply meant using the built in task functions in Outlook. When I switched to a Mac I continued to use Outlook for about a year or so for mail and tasks since I wasn’t comforatable enough with iCal, Address Book, and Mail. By 10.3 or so I switched over and began using iCal for task management. iCal is a good calendar program, but it isn’t so hot for tasks (in my opinion). I used it since it was what worked when syncing my Treo’s. I wanted to have the categories stay intact so I had problems with Entourage. That left me stuck with iCal. I tried Market Circles’s Daylite for a while. In the version 1.x days or even the early 3.x days it wasn’t the best with syncing with the Palm so I used it on and off again but I always ended up back with iCal. It wasn’t the best solution, but it was the one that worked for most of the basic functions. When Daylite 3.5/3.6 came out last summer with Sync Services support I switched back to Daylite. I had problems with my computer that forced me again back to iCal. By the time I got my iphone I knew I needed to find a new solution for task management, since the iphone didn’t support iCal tasks. Daylite is coming out with an iphone product that looked perfect, and there were a few other products out there that did similar functions, but my new job threw a kink in my plans. See next paragraph!

During this entire time using a Mac based program was not an issue since the two companies that I worked at didn’t care if I used my own Macbook. My boss at Partsearch at one point allowed my tech team to buy Mac’s when we wanted to. He even got one. My current job however requires me to use a windows PC exclusively. This poses a problem for me. If I used a desktop program to manage tasks I would have to choose between data I can only access at work or via my work laptop or data that I can access only at home or via a PDA. Neither option was appealing to me. For the first 3 weeks at my new job I was using outlook for work tasks, and continued to use iCal for personal ones. It was becoming apparent that I needed to take the plunge and choose one. I couldn’t decide! Then I remembered I signed up for Hiveminder. It is a web based task tool by Best Practical. They are the guys that make Request Tracker, a favorite issue tracking tool I have used at a few companies. I started using that site for my new tasks. It was an ok experience. I had some issues with the usability of the site so I wasn’t sure if I would continue using it.

The overall idea of a web based tool did have my curiosity. In the past I had discounted a web based tool since I wanted a full featured client. Now I needed the flexibility of accessing my data anywhere. I went to Lifehacker to see what reviews they had for web based task management or GTD tools. I found a few that looked promising. That was when I came accross Remember The Milk. I remembered reading reviews about RTM a while ago, and every review was positive. So after signing up and playing with 2 or 3 other services I signed up for an account with RTM. It has only been a few days, but I have all my active tasks in RTM. So far I have found it to offer most of what I am looking for. I can have lists, tags, due dates, & reminders. It has a good search function. Adding of notes isn’t so hard. It also has a quick entry for for tasks (Hiveminder’s is better, but you can’t have everything). I also like that I can access an iPhone optimized version of the site. It isn’t an offline client, but it is close enough. I can also view (unfortunately not edit) my tasks in iCal. I just downloaded the gmail plugin for RTM that allows me to manage my tasks in my Google Apps account. That looks very promising also. The other major feature I love is the offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If I had any doubt that I would be trying this service for a while it went out the window with the offline mode option.

Remember The Milk

For now I am exploring what I can do with RTM. As it stands now task management is now another function I can perform via a web app, and not an installed application. More about that in a later post.

So why am I rambling on for paragraphs about task management? There are a few tools (hardware or software) that I live and die by. Managing tasks is one of those critical tools and I have been in limbo for ages with mediocre options (Daylite excluded, it rocked but I was never 100% right for my situation). With Remember The Milk, it looks like I have a great tool, and I have options with how I access it. I like that. I know I am fickle. In two weeks I might be writing about some fatal flaw I found in this service that makes it not right for me, but for now this is the way to go for me!

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Vista

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I am once again dabbling with Microsoft Vista. I installed Vista using bootcamp on my Mac Mini the other day. Now that I am using the iMac more and more, I can give the Mini a dual role of normal Mac and Vista. The iMac is much more powerful so using it for video processing and other functions I used to do on the Mini makes sense. WIth the Mini freed up I can play with it and do Vista on it. So far I haven't put any software on it. I am just tweaking the install and patching it. I don't know why I am really spending any time with Vista if I am so happy with my Mac. I guess my need to tinker outweighs common sense sometimes. Not to worry I am not abandoning my Mac any time soon. On the contrary, I am waiting for the new Macbook's or Macbook Pro's to get released so I can upgrade.

Bluetooth Mice & USB Hubs

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Today I did get my package I was waiting for so I now have a 7 port USB hub for my Macbook at home. No more swapping out one device to make room for another. The old 4 port hub now can goto the office since I need one there. I also got a bluetooth mouse for the Vaio laptop I got at work. There are only two USB ports on that little thing. One of them is hidden so it is difficult to get to. I want to plug in my Skype phone to the USB port, so it makes life easier if I have a bluetooth mouse that I don’t have to worry about plugging in a dongle to get the wireless to work. My current travel mouse is like that. It works, but it is a pain to deal with the dongle. This new Microsoft travel mouse worked in about a minute with the bluetooth on the Vaio. I can also use it on my Macbook if I need to when traveling.

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My New Webcam

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Yesterday I got a brand new USB webcam I ordered. I know, I have an iMac with a camera, and my Macbook has one too, so why is this a big deal. It is because I use my Macbook as my main computer and when it is on my desk at work or at home it is plugged into a monitor and the lid is closed. That means using the built in iSight camera is not an option. I have wanted to buy a camera for a while but most recent USB camera's don't always support the Mac. I didn't want to deal with open source drivers. Thankfully Macally came out with a nice cheap USB webcam, the IceCam2.. It didn't need any drivers, and I was up and running with the camera in about 5 minutes. I placed a test call to my dad via Skype and it worked great. There is something wrong with his speakers because we always get static when doing a call, but the next time I am over there I will take a look at it.

I also got a laptop stand I can keep at work. One of the things I don't like about the Macbook is that when it gets hot the fan run's really loud and it is annoying. The stand should hopefully allow better airflow on the Macbook.

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Chair Blogging

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I am attempting to write on my Sony Vaio laptop I have from work. It is so tiny. It is one of those 2.5lbs units with a tiny screen. I have to push the fonts up to 22pt in order for me to see things when I put the laptop on my lap. They keyboard is small, but so far I am able to touch time without tons of errors. I don't know how long i can do it for.

Even though the laptop is less than 3lbs this is the first weekend I have taken it home. I had to get everything configured properly on it as well as get a power adapter so i can leave it at home. I know, I have a Macbook that I travel to and from work with, but when I am home it acts like a desktop so this tiny guy is nice to have for times like right now when i want to sit on my comfy chair and type. It also has broadband access so i can get on the internet from anywhere Sprint has mobile service. That makes it worth it to travel with. OK enough talking about extra computers that I am tinkering with.