The long and winding road to Mac nirvana (the cult of Steve Jobs)
Every now and again I come accross something that’s just plain cool. These items are often something that I’ve thought about trying to create myself. In this case, I had an idea about one item (the LapTuk), and was thinking about creating something jsut like it, and then POW! I find it on the web.
Pretty cool, and gives you lots more desk space to work with.
While you’re out and about, take a look at Macessity. They have many more items to make your mac life more organized.
A few months back, and before the 3.1.2 update, I came across a hack that allowed me to use my iPhone tethered to provide an internet connection for a laptop. This was a godsend, it allowed me to grab a connection whenever and wherever I was (provided I could get a cell signal).
I found out that this hack wouldn’t work when updating, but being the good little apple user I was, I ran the update anyway and just assumed that functionality was gone. Having MMS had to be cool, and would make it worthwhile.
To be perfectly honest, I have sent a total of one MMS message, and that’s it. It wasn’t quite the useful feature addition I thought it would be, and I miss the tethered capabilities.
Ok, so that being said, the upgrade to 3.1.2 left a config file on my phone, an “Unsigned” config file. As you likely know, with the 3.1.2 update, unsigned profiles don’t do good things. The least of which for em was to break visual voicemail. (Here’s where I admit how little attention I actually pay to things around me). This broke visual voice mail to a point that I no longer got any notices of voicemail, nor did I get a list of voicemail to listen to.
Long story short, it was this way for a little over two months. Ninety-three messages. I found them thanks to a client that was nice enough (and persistent enough) to send me an email after leaving the voice mail, asking me “what’s up”. So I headed back into the voice mail manually and found everything that had been building up for the last two plus months.
The fix for this is a relatively easy one, delete the unsigned profile, and reset the network settings. This is all found in the settings section.
I hope things are leveled out now, and I hope that no one ends up missing voicemail for as long as I have..
The upgrade to Snow Leopard is a good one. The additional features are great, and I love the new little bells and whistles. It also seems that as granddad used to say “there are two sides to every coin”. I now seem to have a dying battery in my beloved macbook pro.
This seems a little odd to me, since I have cycled my battery as recommended, and reset the SMC as recommended. I find it difficult to accept that my battery has lost its life this quickly. When running 10.5.8, I was getting about 3.5 hours, and my battery was showing a full charge capacity of close to 5000mAh. This information has dropped since the install of Snow Leopard, to almost 1/2 the power. It now shows a full charge capacity of 3300mAh some days, and as of the writing of this post, it shows a full charge capacity of 4200mAh.
You can see why I would be a little confused, as it jumps around a bit. I have not had the sudden shut off issues that other users have mentioned, but it still is a bit befuddling to have the capacity of the batter be this “all over te board”, especially after only 40 cycles on this battery.
Apple, please help, and update the SW (or ?) to take care of this issue…. I phoned, and provided system reports to substantiate this, and haven’t heard anything back.. I would genereally say that Apples service is great, as it has been, but in this case, it seems that no one cares to admit that there might be an issue, at least no one that has the capability to fix it.
I’ll be holding out on buying another battery, at least until I can find some more information online about the solution.
A month or so ago I ordered a case for my iPhone. I assumed that I would be hard on it, and should get something to protect it a bit. I did some searching, and came up with a beautiful case made by iFrogz.
It looks great, it has a slightly rubberized coating that keeps it form sliding around, and it’s not nearly as ugly as those rubber slip on cases that are everywhere. I have to say that I absolutely LOVE the looks of this case.
Now for the downside. Where the 2 halves of the case come together, there are small allignment tabs. (I bet you know where this is going) I treated it quite gently, the case was on and that was pretty much it, no messing about with it, and nothing that should have broken these tabs. Even with that, the tabs went away, one day I noticed that one side of the case was not lining up quite right, and sure enough, the tab on that side was gone. Soon after, the tab on the other side was gone. and the case barely stays on at all. What a shame…
So, I have found another case, not nearly as slick looking as the iFrogz case, but far more secure. It’s made by mivizu, and comes in 2 parts. They snap securely around the phone, and have none of the small tabs to break that the iFrogs have.
So, I guess you can have pretty, or you can have good, but you can’t have both.. This case should last quite a bit longer than the iFrogz case, but….
Like many others, I upgraded to Snow Leopard and was headed all ahead full. Sadly, one of the apps that I couldn’t get installed was the Logitech control center for my MX Revolution mouse. The mouse worked., but mapping of buttons and custom features was not available. USB Overdrive kind of helped, but wasn’t quite as convenient as the native software. (I had to disable it to use the Wacom tablet.) Over at OSxHints, there is a solution, you drill into the install package and install via the Center.pkg file. This one works, and works well. Head on over to the article (here) and happy mousing.
Running down my weekly reading, and found over at lifehacker an article that mentions the ability to open a different app for each camera you connect to your mac. I thought “How convenient” and “It’s about damn time”. So off to test I went. It works, eac camera I own will now open a different app (if I choose to). This will make life easier for those of us that own an iPhone, and a couple of different digital cameras.
Link to the article at LIfehacker is here
It seems that an app that I would have used alot, (and I mean for EVERYTHING) has been cut out of the itunes app store. I read about it’s cut before I got a chance to find it and grab it, though I’m not too sure that it ever made it to a point that i could have.
I’m talking about an app to integrate Google’s voice services with the iPhone. Google has aquired what was once known as Grand central. One phone number that you can control and forward to multiple numbers, voicemail, sms, and cut rate long distance services are all part of the package. It’s an amazing set of features for a free package (the outbound calls are not free, but the charges are minimal)
So, to get on with the story, apparently there was an app ready, that for one reason or another was not approved / removed from the app store. Apple says it was due to “feature overlap” and some of the tech pundits have speculated it was due to pressure from AT&T. Who really knows, but it has wound up with the FCC investigating.
This doesn’t sound good for either Apple or AT&T, as it can’t be a positive thing to have them digging around into why you do what you do.
I don’t really wish any ill will on Apple or AT&T (well not Apple anyway) as they have always taken pretty good care of me. I would love to see an openess to new apps, and let the public determine what succeeds / fails.
More on the FCC inquiry here
So, I set up time machine to use my NAS volume as found over on Engadget using : defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
and have been skating along with no worries, well almost.
About a month into it, I could no longer mount the sparseimage.
I ran disk utility on it, and no luck. I found a solution over at bukisa, and ran hdiutil as they specified, but no luck there either.
Looks like I’ll be spending the cash on DiskWarrior, unless someone who reads this blog has another solution.
Anyone?
After years of using Outlook, and getting used to all the little idiosyncrasies it contains, the change over to OSx was a little disheartening. Back in the PC days, I had outlook and a palm device. Nothing like the new phones and the like, I’m talking about a Palm IV (modem and all). It synced with outlook, and all contacts and tasks were there in perpetuity. It made it easy to keep track of things and until the Palm died, it was GTD nirvana (at least for the early 90s). I made the change over to Mac, and then recently to the iPhone and I still hadn’t found anything to take the place of the task list in Outlook. Something integrated with email would be nice (or at least close to what I was used to). I have struggled along with text edit, and a very simple process of adding and deleting tasks. Even better would be something that tied into the iPhone, and allowed me to kind of replace the process I once used with the Palm.
I fumbled through a few free apps for the iPhone, and some were nice, but none really connected with the desktop the way I was looking to. This last week I found “Things” made by Cultured Code. It isn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it has caused me to re evaluate what it was I was looking for. There is a desktop app available for $49.95 that nicely handles your task lists, and allows you to integrate them with your calendar (iCal, and you can sync with google calendar). Short of being integrated with e-mail, this is what I was after. I have also found that being able to change e-mail clients without changing my task workflow is a nice feature.
To top it all off, there is an iPhone app available that syncs with the desktop version. So, it appears that I have come full circle, and ended up with a good way to track tasks. It’s not quite the days of the PC and palm, but then I might not want to be exactly where I was back then. The frills of OSx and the iPhone make this well worth a shot if you are looking to get away from old tech, and still keep track of your task lists.
With iPhone in hand, and the learning curve starting to even out a bit, I’ve decided to put photos on it. Seemed like a good idea, after all this device is made for that sort of thing. Being able to share images with friends, and show them to people seems like a great feature.
There are some drawbacks to this, most likely related to how I use my mac for photo storage. If I were to use iPhoto, or Aperture, I’d be fine. They both allow you to organize your images by collection, and send those collections to you phone. Being able to use collections helps keep everything straight but keeping your photos grouped as you have them grouped in the software.
Like I said, if I used that software I’d be all set. I, however, do not use either. I am a Lightroom user, and have so many images in LR that it just didn’t make sense to switch over, or to keep 2 libraries.
Lightroom doesn’t directly support the iPhone, though you can size and export images to a folder, then import that folder via iTunes. This works nicely, but does not allow for multiple folders, or changing the order that the images are displayed. (They are ordered by filename)
So, though there are some other software packages out there for the PC / Windows side of things, I have been unable to find an equivalent for the OSx world. I have been relegated to exporting them as jpegs, bringing them into iPhoto, and then sending them to the iPhone via iTunes.
If anyone happens to have a better workflow that includes LR, please let me know.
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