Wednesday, June 17. 2009
iPhone 3.0 Released
| Apple has released iPhone software update 3.0. Among the promised improvements are: Cut-n-Paste (at last!) Landscape keyboard in certain apps (Mail, Safari, Messages, Notes) MMS (not available yet - thanks AT&T  ) Tethering (not available yet - thanks AT&T ) Spotlight Search Voice Memos Of course, this doesn't take the sting out of not being able to get the new iPhone 3GS at the discounted price, but oh well. (minor note: AT&T has slightly revised their position on the eligibility for the upgrade at the discounted price.) Update (6/18/09): There are some pretty cool hidden features in the latest firmware update, detailed in this PC World Article. |  |
Tuesday, June 9. 2009
AT&T valued customer service?
Lovely snippet from AT&T:
No iPhone until December??? - Boo!! (makes me want to switch to Verizon  )(A little bit more info on this nonsense) At this rate, it looks like I will have to pass on the 3GS altogether - makes much more sense to just wait another 6 months for the iPhone 4G, especially with a rumored multicore processor on the horizon. | |
Friday, April 17. 2009
Mac: SuperDuper to the Rescue
| Of late, my MacBookPro has been going slower and slower, to the point of being almost unusable due to severe and continual disk swapping (the ever-dreaded beachball effect). It seems (despite what various pundits say) that my disk was severely fragmented - despite having close to 30 GB free, my machine would often churn for minutes (sometimes up to 10 mins) at a time, due to the lack of contiguous free space (it should be noted that I do a lot of Photoshop editing with fairly large RAW files). I didn't want to necessarily do a fresh install, since I have some built from scratch applications (i.e. KDE window system among them) which would be a pain to rebuild again, so enter SuperDuper! Backup tool. I have written about the SuperDuper! Backup tool previously, but have never used it in a restore before . Of course, as long as one is going to do a backup and restore, you may as well restore to a bigger disk as well (so I purchased a Western Digital 320GB Scorpio Black with Free Fall Sensor SATA 7200 RPM). The only other hitch is that with the 17" Mac Book Pro, it seems that Apple tried to make it painful to swap out the drive, requiring 30 screws (?!) as well as a T-6 Torque wrench. Fortunately, there are a number of guides around the internet detailing the disassembly procedure (iFixIt and ExtremeTech to name a few).Also, luckily for me, I had the extremely nimble fingers of my co-worker as well.  Just to be on the safe side I made sure that I had backed up my Address Book, Little Snitch FW rules, Adium ChatLogs and 1Password entries (as it turns out below, it was a good thing that I did. The restore took approximately 4.5 hours (for 135GB of data) and the only hitches I ran into were: Permissions issue with Spotlight Verify that Backblaze had the new drive set for backup Had to restore Little Snitch rules from a recent backup (fortunately made one right before the disk swap ) Error in my Adium Chatlogs rsync script, but that is my issue Both the Backblaze and Little Snitch glitches were pretty straightforward to correct. The Spotlight one took slightly longer to track down (wasn't the usual issues with the prefs file that usually cause Spotlight to stop indexing). These were the permissions immediately after the restore: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drw------- 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 I corrected the permissions, and after a reboot, Spotlight started indexing again: colleen-velos-computer-2:/ colleenvelo$ ls -ald /.Spotlight-V100 drwx------ 8 root colleenv 272 Apr 17 17:32 /.Spotlight-V100 at any rate, after the above permissions correction, I could once again get a correct status on the Spotlight status (without getting an error): colleen-velos-computer-2:/Volumes colleenvelo$ sudo mdutil -s "Macintosh HD" Macintosh HD: Status: Indexing Enabled I suspect the above issue has something to do with SuperDuper! putting the Spotlight in read-only mode (probably to ensure db consistency, I suspect). (fyi: for those interested in the gory HFS file system details, there is handy command-line debug tool, hfsdebug, which shows interesting info regarding an HFS file system. Also, this is a nice article on usage). |  |
Thursday, April 9. 2009
Safari 4 Public Beta: Thoughts...
| I have been playing around with Safari 4 Public Beta for a little bit now and comparing it to the beta version of Firefox 3.45b4pre. Probably one of the biggest debates on the new Safari 4 Public Beta browser is the redesigned Tabs interface. Of course, Firefox still has a considerable edge in the Themes and Extensions category (I do miss my ScrollBarAnywhere and DuplicateTabs extensions), however, I would have to say that Safari 4 Public Beta seems to have the edge performance-wise so far. Running on my MacBookPro, it doesn't seem to have the tax on CPU resources that Firefox could sometimes have and does seem to render pages faster. Of course, there is the usual differences between web sites, where some will work better under one browser versus the other (i.e. ColorJack seems to work better under Firefox than under the new Safari 4. |  |
Wednesday, April 8. 2009
Serendipity 1.4.1 Released
Serendipity 1.4.1 was released on Jan 16th, 2009. Even though this is touted mainly as a bugfix release, it seems that the Administration interface has been jazzed a little bit between 1.3.1 and 1.4.1 (for the better ). Again, as always, upgrading was very pain-free.
). Again, as always, upgrading was very pain-free. Tuesday, April 7. 2009
iTunes 8.1.1 Released
iTunes 8.1.1 has been released. According to the official Apple Release: iTunes 8.1.1 adds support for renting HD movies and provides a number of bug fixes, including addressing issues with VoiceOver and syncing with iPhone or iPod touch. |  |
Sunday, March 22. 2009
iPhone update 3.0 rundown
| After Apple's March 17th preview of the upcoming iPhone 3.0 OS - here is a quick roundup of the promised features: MMS Tethering via USB ).Update (3/13/09): Ok, since more rumors are flying regarding the impending 3.0 firmware announcement, here is the latest list from the iPhoneBlog (ignore the fact that it sounds suspiciously like the current iPhone wishlist ): Cut-n-Paste New Springboard Push Notification (or Background Tasks)  | |
Friday, March 13. 2009
iPhone update 3.0 coming?
| There are rumors that Apple is set to announce the June release iPhone update 3.0 on March 17th. Some of the promised features are: MMS Tethering via USB ).Update (3/13/09): Ok, since more rumors are flying regarding the impending 3.0 firmware announcement, here is the latest list from the iPhoneBlog (ignore the fact that it sounds suspiciously like the current iPhone wishlist ): Cut-n-Paste New Springboard Push Notification (or Background Tasks) | |
Thursday, March 12. 2009
iTunes 8.1 Released
iTunes 8.1 has been released as a 65MB update. According to the official Apple Release: iTunes 8.1 is now faster and more responsive. Noticeable improvements when working with large libraries, browsing the iTunes Store, preparing to sync with iPod or iPhone, and optimizing photos for syncing are also claimed. Small changes include: Allows friends to request songs for iTunes DJ.Adds Genius sidebar for your Movies and TV Shows.. Improves performance when downloading iTunes Plus songs. Provides AutoFill for manually managed iPods. Allows CDs to be imported at the same sound quality as iTunes Plus. Includes many accessibility improvements. Allows iTunes U and the iTunes Store to be disabled separately using Parental Controls. Another interesting note from the The Mac Security Blog is: This version includes a security fix for an issue where subscribing to a malicious podcast could lead to the disclosure of a users iTunes username and password. There is also a Windows-only fix for a potential denial of service issue. More information can be found here. | |
Twitter taking over..?
Monday, January 5. 2009
Happy New Year!!
Friday, December 19. 2008
Slow Blogging (again)
Thursday, December 4. 2008
Truest Signs yet that we are in a recession
| I am evidently late to the party on this one, but just found out that Google's SearchMash is a casualty of the recession and has been officially shutdown. |  |
Friday, November 28. 2008
Digital SLR Upgrade - Part II
| One of the facts that I forgot to mention in my previous posting was that the condition of the shipping box was not good, with a huge dent and small rip on the side that housed my new camera. So not surprisingly, after having the camera for less than 24 hours, it got into a weird state where the mirror was locked in the "up" position and nothing could seem to jog it out of that state (not even doing a full reset on the camera). After spending some time both on the Amazon website and on the phone with them, a new replacement was shipped out with overnight shipping the same day (with me having 30 days to ship the defective unit back) - unfortunately, that meant that the replacement unit would not be here for the Thanksgiving holiday, which is of course one of the two events this week that I was hoping to use it for. After practically doing a donut getting into the work parking lot in a effort to flag down the UPS truck (another long story, but short version is that the local distribution centers were closed today, so unless I met the UPS truck at my work address {mistake on Amazon's part - it was supposed to be shipped to my home address}, the camera would be unavailable until Monday), I did manage to get my replacement camera in my hands. So now the race is on to see if I can shoot enough pictures between now and tomorrow morning in order to be confident that this new unit won't flake out on me at a one-year old birthday party for my cousin that I am shooting (sadly the replacement unit wasn't packed much better either {1 airpad only??}, but at least there were no huge dents or rips). Fingers-crossed that it will work out ok.... |  |
Tuesday, November 25. 2008
Digital SLR Upgrade
| At my friend's birthday party this past weekend, one of the people there had a Pentax K100D. After playing around with it for a little bit, I sadly was reminded of probably how Pippin felt when touching the Palantir (sorry, non-LOTR readers ) as the overwhelming urge to upgrade my Pentax D-SLR strongly took hold. I have had my trusty Pentax ist*DS since 2004 and, thousands of photos later, it is quite safe to say that I have gotten a great deal of use from it (and will probably be keeping it as a backup unit). After spending quite a bit of time comparing (via reviews and forums threads) the Pentax K20D, Canon 40D and the Nikon D300. After weeding out the fan-boy rants and threads, the overall general consensus seemed to be that all three models would give you stunning photos; it boiled down to both cost and the type of photography that one would be doing. For sports-centric photography, the slant seems to be towards Canon (or Nikon), both for their lenses in the 300mm+ range and their fast 6+fps speed. However, for actual detail, Pentax was on par with both the equivalent Canon and Nikon models (or ahead of them, depending on which review you believe). For me, it basically boiled down to: "Is the occasional sports photography that I do worth tossing out all of my Pentax lenses and Pentax flash?" and the answer came back "No". Overwhelmingly I do much more family and outdoor/landscape shots, so the extra detail that I get with the 14.6MP Pentax (to say nothing of a weather-sealed body) makes more sense (even on top of the being able to still use all of my lenses). So, thanks to the goodness of Amazon Prime, I had my new Pentax K20D in short order. A couple of the features that I fell immediately in love with was the Auto Focus Adjustment to fine-tune some older Pentax lenses so theyd autofocus perfectly (settings for up to 20 lenses can be saved). Also, the K20Ds new image-comparison function allows me to call any two images up on the LCD screen, examine them side-by-side at up to 32x magnification, and cull bad images to free up memory-card space - nice!! I am still fooling around with the body-based shake reduction feature as well as the many others, so a more in-depth review will be posted shortly. (of course, I also happened to come across some very nice Pentax-centric PhotoBlogs (here and here) in the research process; with the Pentax official site having some stunning photos taken with the K20D). | |
