Archive for the 'Apple' Category

Shaking It Up A Bit

Published
by
C.G.
on January 15, 2008
in Apple, Computers and Hacks
. 0 Comments

As part of my new year’s resolution to be healthier, I went to the gym this evening after work. I’m working hard - feeling the burn - and I’m on my last exercise feeling good. All of a sudden, I drop my iPod. I wasn’t too worried about it. I had dropped my iPod before on harder surfaces (the gym floor is that rubbery stuff). When I picked it up, I still heard music playing and only noticed something was a little off when I tried to rewind the song I was listening to at the time I dropped it. A quick sliding of the ‘lock’ feature once or twice and it was fine. I finished my workout and went to the locker room where I grabbed my jacket, took the elevator down to the ground floor, and started walking home. All of a sudden, as the iPod started playing a new song in the playlist, it stops.

Just like I had attempted to do before, I slid the ‘lock’ button around to try and free it up but it didn’t work this time. Again, thinking nothing of it, I tried to reboot the iPod by pressing the ‘Menu’ and the ‘Select’ button in the center of the click wheel. It was then, I saw something I had never seen before - the sick iPod.

The sick iPod is a picture of the Gen 1 iPod that only worked with a Mac (unless you hacked it or used XPlay like I did). Below this frowning iPod is the link to Apple’s support page for the iPod.

Now I didn’t have a lot of faith in Apple’s support page. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been able to solve a lot of problems by visiting their site and feel that, while it doesn’t account for every situation, I’m satisfied with what solutions they do offer. But predictably, they didn’t have any simple instructions on how to de-brick your iPod… except buy a new one.

So I started looking at the new iPod Nanos. The small form factor, I thought, would be great for keeping it in my pocket. No more using a belt clip (that didn’t keep my current iPod in place). I also thought of getting the iTouch. With its large widescreen display - and all those new features announced today at Macworld 2008 by Steve Jobby-Jobs - I thought it might satisfy my craving to watch TV and movies on the subway. But I didn’t like the small-ish storage they offered.

I have almost 50GB of music and 15 GB of video already. An 8GB Nano or a 16GB Touch wasn’t going to cut it. The “Classsic” iPods, while thinner than the one I have - and capable of storing all my media needs for a while, didn’t seem like a good purchase either because it only offered me a slightly different version of the iPod that I have. Plus, will all the cool things announced along with the iPod upgrades (MacBook Air, Time Capsule, and the new AppleTV), I’m already looking at contributing a significant amount of paper route money to Steve’s backdated options income.

So after chatting with a friend of mine, I decided to seek out a fix for my bricked iPod on the Interweb - I hear they have the Internet on computers now…. (sorry for the Simpson’s joke). I did a quick search and found the wonderful site, iLounge. Their forums have been a great source of information on all things iPod - today was no different. I couple of clicks here. A few more there. And presto! I found a post that offered hope. The the solution was unconventional to say the least.

Most of the posters with bricked iPods were told to shake it. SHAKE IT!!!

Out of all the things you don’t want to do with your hard drive based devices is shake it!

But, the theory was sound to me… The idea is that the hard drive was stuck from the fall and the iPod was playing cached music. Once a song to be played wasn’t in the cache, the iPod threw up. With nothing but a $200 to $399 bill for a new iPod in the cards, I shook it.

Nothing happened.

I shook it again.

Nothing happened.

I started thinking of that saying: Shake it once is ok, shake it twice is ok. But shake it a third time and you’re just playing with yourself.

I stared to wonder if I was either kidding myself into thinking this could work and, again, thought of what iPod I’d be owning (and what I should have engraved on it ;) )

But with nothing to lose, I shook it a third time despite feeling shameful and this time I put my full wrist into it.

Low and behold, it worked!!!!

The moment I tried to reset the iPod, the screen became backlit and started loading my media info. All my playlists are there and I was able to sync the iPod with my computer. Just shaking the iPod saved me from getting a new, shinny, engraved, widescreen or really tiny (and perhaps colored), iPod.

Oh well.

Shiira

Published
by
C.G.
on August 2, 2007
in Apple and Computers
. 0 Comments

I just started using Shiira as a web brower for my Mac and I LOVE it!

It is fast, it looks clean, it passes the Acid2 Test, and it handles tabs much better than Safari does.

If anyone has a Mac and wants the best of Safari and Firefox, I say give Shiira a try!

Inspired to Backup

Published
by
C.G.
on April 11, 2007
in Apple, Computers, Hacks and Linux
. 0 Comments

Over the weekend, I managed to backup my entire music directory to my hosting provider, DreamHost.  I was inspired by Michael Lee’s aptly titled article on How to Backup Your Mac to a DreamHost Server and while I didn’t do all the technical coding work, I managed back up my music files nonetheless.  If you have a Mac, using rsync might be a good way for you to go - especially if you have a 479GB of on-line storage like I do with DreamHost.

It took all weekend to upload 40GB worth of songs so if you have a large collection like I do, this is not for the faint at heart or those with a slow connection.  I have a great high-speed connection and get 30Mbits down and 5Mbits up.  So at roughly 450kb/s, well, you do the math.  Like Michael’s article suggests, I used iCal to schedule my daily backups.  But unlike Mike (if I can call him that), I use my FTP program and created Automator work flows to handle the file transfers.  I created a work flow application that iCal runs every night at 2:30am that checks for the latest version of the files in my music directory and if it finds any changes, it writes over the older version - wherever it may be.

Eventually, I’ll have separate jobs to take care of my other data but I’ll have those jobs run every other night since syncing the music can take up to 20 minutes or so.  I’ve got my photos on a dedicated photo site that I host so that takes care of my pictures.  Though, I might automatically upload new photos to the import directory of the Gallery2 site to make things easy but that’s not necessary.  I’ll also set something similar up for my wife who has no backup of her data.  In fact, neither of us had anything before this.

I thought I’d build a file server like I did when I was the CTO of the small company I used to work for.  And while I would still love to do that, its not very cost effective.  Plus, it would be noisy and big - it wouldn’t go with the new Mac based office I’ve created since I picked up the Mini.  Hiding the server (it would have to be a rack mounted array… it has to be) would be tough since we don’t have a lot of closet space in our condo.  And it would still generate a lot of heat and use a lot of electricity we don’t want to waste.

But back to the automation I did…

I was inspired to try the automated backup program that Michael Lee wrote about.  And now, finally, I feel that I can sleep at night knowing that my files are safer.  I’m also inspired to see what else I can do with Automator, iCal, and rsync.  Anyone have a good work flow they care to share?

Something New in iTunes?

Published
by
C.G.
on March 12, 2007
in Apple and Computers
. 0 Comments

I was browsing the iTunes Music Store earlier and noticed something cool when I looked at the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank.  You could pre-order the CD just like any other album but when you did, it would charge your account the 99 cents now and download their one song, Dashboard.  When the CD is released, however, the balance of CD will download but you will be charged the full price of the CD minus the cost of the single - something new as far as I know.

People have been asking for this a long time and it looks as if they got it.  I’m not sure if its new to iTunes 7.1 only but nevertheless, its new to me and its something I’ve been looking for in my favorite music venue, too.  I wish I had that when I bought the Fall Out Boy track, “This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race”.  What they need to do now is to extend that to CDs already released.  Then it would make iTMS the best way to get music (that is if you don’t mind the crippling DRM that the industry slabs on).

Has anyone else noticed this in other albums or is it just Modest Mouse?

Running in Parallels

Published
by
C.G.
on March 3, 2007
in Apple, Computers and Linux
. 0 Comments

When I heard the announcement that Parallels had released another (and final) version of their OS virtualization software, I decided to give it a try.  The way I figure, the $80 or so it costs will pale in comparison to the headache I would feel if I got rid of my PC.  Now I don’t plan on getting rid of my PC but if I do, its good to know that I can do so without missing the essential apps I have used for years.  The money is also worth it for me to “play” with new or beta OSs without having to damage my XP or my Ubuntu partitions.  In fact, after I get done with creating an Ubuntu image, I’m going to install another one but this time the server LAMP version.

So far, I love it! XP installed without a problem (which I can’t say happened on my real PC) and the Ubuntu install is going smoothly.  If I get things to work well, I’ll install Parallels on my wife’s computer, too, so she can use XP.  Of course, for me to do that, I need to uninstall my XP (don’t want to get in trouble with the Windows Gestapo Association).