blindsquirrel.org

I love Wordpress. It’s an excellent blogging platform. I love my iPod Touch and my wife’s iPhone. Now I get to play with them together as Wordpress has been released on the iTunes App store, and of course, it’s free.

I can’t see myself doing long posts with it as using the portrait keyboard on the Touch means I have to type one handed, but for shorter posts, like this one, it will come in handy, especially when not in front of a “real” computer.

Speaking of which, I’ll have to update on my first week with the new 2.0 software and the new apps that I have been using. I will say that I still have issues with AT&T and Apple, as I have already posted, but I underestimated the power of the App store and 3rd party apps. My Touch has taken on a fresh, new life - but that’s for another post; one that requires a real keyboard!

Thank you to the folks at Wordpress for the iPhone/iTouch app. I’m using it to write this post and so far it looks like a winner. The only thing i could not see how to do was add an html link inside the post.

I just spent the better part of the night trying to get data back from a friend’s MacBook that had a failed hard drive. Those of you that have had this happen while running Apple’s OS X may know the sickening feeling you get when all you see when you start up is an icon of a folder with a flashing question mark. Sometimes you can get lucky by resetting PRAM and telling the system what disk to boot from, but this was not the case with this MacBook. It was painful and took forever to get any data back at all.

Fortunately I had my MacBook Pro with me to help get through this. I had DiskWarrior on my MBP and figured I would just start up the MacBook in firewire target mode and let DiskWarrior have a look. (You do vacation with a 6 pin to 6 pin firewire cable, don’t you? Yeah, me neither, but I was lucky enough to find one at a Best Buy in Myrtle Beach since everything else had just closed. Unfortunately I paid a premium for that cable from Best Buy, as you do with all cables you buy there, but I was in no position to complain and they were my last option for the night.)

Well, the MacBook had different ideas about how this was going to work and I could not see the hard drive regardless of what I did; hold down the Option key. Nothing. Hold down Shift. Nothing. Hold down Command-S. Nothing. Command-V. Nothing. Hold down C to boot from a Tiger install DVD I had in my bag. Nothing. Hold down T for firewire target mode. Nothing!

As a last ditch effort I decided to make sure I was doing things correctly and tried to put my MBP in target mode and bring up the MacBook using my MBP’s hard drive. It actually worked. I still could not see the local drive on the MacBook, but I was able to run DiskWarrior against the MacBook and it did find the hard drive and did it’s best to repair. But it couldn’t. It was pretty much beyond repair and DiskWarrior gave me one last chance to pull off all the data I could in preview mode, so I copied as much of her data as I could to my MBP hard drive and every USB key I could find. That got us most of the way there. Now she can deal with Apple since it is under Apple Care and they can replace the hard drive.  In the end I was able to salvage their pictures, documents, settings, and music.

So here is my simple recommendations for protecting your data relatively inexpensive while still getting backups done in a decent amount of time:

• For email, either use a web browser to access your email at your ISP (or GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc.) or configure your mail client for IMAP so you always have a copy of your email at your mail provider. If you must do POP/POP3 configure the client to leave a copy of the messages on the server. This way you will not have to deal with email recovery in the event of a disaster.  If your ISP purges email from its servers every X amount of days - find another email provider.
• Do yourself a favor so you never have to go through the recovery process I just went through - go buy an external USB drive and use it for backups. The performance will be fine and if you are running OS X Leopard it will immediately recognize the disk and ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine backups. Answer yes and move on with your life. I probably spent close to 12 hours trying to save the data because I knew very few others would even try to save her data at all. The drives work just as well with Windows. I probably wouldn’t waste my time with the backup software that comes with the drives, as the operating system will have something you can use that it probably better.

There are other backup utilities out there. Do some light reading on Google and see which one makes the most sense for you. It doesn’t matter to me if you are using 10,000 floppy disks, USB keys, USB hard drives, copying to other computers somewhere in your home, backing up to one of the hosted backup solutions, or using .Mac - just do something! As we put more and more data on our computers the problem just gets worse and worse.

Best Buy has the Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB External Hard Drive on sale for $99 right now. It has USB connectivity and should work very well for backups. I may buy 2. The price goes up if you need Firewire connectivity or more storage, but this looks like a decent size and fit for me. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is to check our backups. It’s such an easy thing to do and none of of do it like we should. None of us. It is not a matter of if a drive is going to fail, it is a matter of when. Good backups will lessen the pain when you have to rebuild that computer, or reload the hard drive from scratch.

I haven’t updated in a while because there really hasn’t been much I felt like talking about, but with the iPhone 3G coming out in less than 2 days I figured I would give my unsolicited reasons why I’ll be sticking with my iPod Touch for now.

My issues aren’t so much with Apple as they are with AT&T, but in the end I guess they both get some of the credit equally.  For example, I like the following items:

• 3G performance.  I live in the Pittsburgh area and the AT&T coverage maps show us just dripping in glorious high speed bandwidth.
• GPS.  This is a pro and a con with me.  I like that the phone can figure out where I am, etc., but it is still lacking in what I really want when we say GPS.  I’ll get to that in the items I don’t like below.
• Price.  Hey, I can live with the extra 10 bucks a month for higher Internet performance, but I have a couple huge issues with the pricing that I’ll discuss below, but the price to purchase an iPhone is very attractive at $199 and $299.
• Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.  Huge pro in my opinion.  I have used cell phones based on Windows Mobile and I now have a BlackBerry Curve.  Overall I feel the BlackBerry kicks Windows Mobile’s ass, but you can’t deny that Exchange ActiveSync is a better, faster, more seamless solution for accessing Exchange.  Don’t get me wrong, you’d have a hard time getting the BlackBerry Curve away from me, but I like Exchange Active Sync better than the BES solution.
• Apps!  OK, this one may be a wash as I have (well, had) a jailbroken iPod Touch and having access to all of those 3rd party applications made the Touch a lot more valuable to me than the factory default model.
• Push email with MobileMe.

But along with the good comes the reasons that I don’t really see the new iPhone 3G in my near future.

• Consumer vs Enterprise data plans?  Come on AT&T, I’ll take the extra $10 a month for unlimited access to your 3G network, but charging enterprises an extra $25 a month, or $15 a month more than the consumer plan is just lame.  It is purely greed and is inexcusable.  There is no reason for this enterprise penalty.  Carries need to stop using the tern “unlimited” unless they really mean unlimited.
• No SMS messages included with the data plan?  None?  Come on.  Actually, all of you carriers out there need to listen up, the fact that you have the balls to charge us for SMS messages when we already have a data plan is ridiculous and is nothing more than another example of pure greed.  We have the data plan, there is no need to hit us for texting on top of it.
• GPS.  So I am hearing that the GPS antenna is too weak to work as a true turn by turn GPS, and I’ve also heard that Apple have stated in the SDK that 3rd parties may not implement turn by turn navigation systems as well.  What gives?  How useful will the GPS be if I can’t get turn by turn directions out of it?  I was hoping to eliminate a device.  Actually, I’m still hoping that Apple will acquire either Garmin or license their technology as I like the Garmin much better than any of the other GPS’ I have used.
• No improvements to the camera or software to control it.
• No video.
• Still no MMS!  Come on, what technical reason is there that the iPhone still does not handle MMS messages?

So the new iPhone 3G is not (yet) for me, but I will keep watching the technology to see if Apple makes improvements to the things that I think are weaknesses today.  I remember when the original iPhone came out last year everyone kept saying that the great thing was Apple could do anything they wanted with the iPhone just by making software changes.  That’s great for some things but that’s not going to fix an underpowered GPS antenna.  Will software magically improve the camera or enable video?  Maybe, we’ll see.

For now, as I write this, I am restoring my iPod Touch back to factory defaults to get ready for the 2.0 software release and the Apps store.  I think those 2 items are the bigger news to me.  I’ll get to play with most of the new applications from the comfort of my home wireless and the iPod Touch.  Maybe some day the timing will be right and the features will exist that put a new iPhone in my hand, but for now I’ll stick with my Touch and the mighty BlackBerry Curve.

There must be an easier way to do this or I am definitely missing something.  All I wanted to do was create a playlist that excluded all songs that were listed as explicit.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, I searched around for a bit and finally gave up and decided it would be easier to just scroll through 4000 songs, watch for the red explicit text, get info on the song, add the word Explicit to the Comment field, and then build a Smart Playlist rule that says “Comment” “does not contain” “Explicit.”

Am I missing something or should the Explicit/Clean tagging be made available as a field so we can use it for playlists, etc.?  My solution worked in the end, but it took a while to scroll through all of those songs and add to the comment field.  Thankfully I only had 4000 or so, but I don’t envy those of you that want to do this and have 10,000 songs or more.

Come on Apple, make this one easier.

I’m usually the one to give the technical help, but now I turn to everyone for my own technical help as I can’t find this answer anywhere - but I’m still looking.

I am using Firefox to access Outlook Web Access and everything works just fine.  But I noticed somewhere along the line, I think with the beta of Firefox 3, that the cursor goes to the bottom of an email when I click on reply.  It used to go to the top, which is where I want it.

I don’t want to get in to a debate on top posting vs bottom posting, as I understand the history of usenet, etc., but Outlook has conditioned us that use it to post replies at the top of the reply instead of the bottom.  I’ve been digging through Google looking for how to get FF version 3 to let me reply at the top of my email but I have yet to find anything.

Anyone?

UPDATE:  I failed to mention that this works as expected when using Safari, but I am testing Firefox.

This will be an almost exact duplicate of a post I made nearly one year ago about Infoworld and how they made the decision to clog my RSS reader with their advertisements, so I made the decision to unsubscribe.  Today I get to say the same thing about eWeek, but their feeds are even worse.  With Infoworld they at least kept a decent amount of content in the feed, but my feeds from eWeek are barely one sentence and then the rest is advertising.  That’s no longer acceptable to me and I’ll continue to get my news elsewhere.

For me the pattern is clear, I do not like RSS feeds that do partial posting in an attempt to make me visit their sites, and if you are going to include advertising in my RSS feed you better provide some content as well.  Don’t force me to go to your site.  I go through way too much data in Google Reader and I’m busy hitting j, j, j, j, etc. reading everything I can and I don’t have the time nor tolerance anymore for those tactics.

So eWeek, just like Infoworld, you’re banned from my feed reader.  I’m doing just fine on  FriendFeed now anyway.  It’s a shame, as I used to enjoy the content you provided, back when you used to provide it.  I’m sure somewhere there is an advertising exec that received a bonus for this great idea.

I like the convenience of being able to watch TV shows from my computer when I am traveling or am not in front of my TV/DVR setup - especially when that experience is free.  I think ABC does a great job with their hosting of shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives, etc., but I just ran in to a problem I never saw coming.

That content is free to me because it contains ads that I have to watch.  I don’t mind that much, I’m getting free content and there are less commercials than if I watched it on live TV, so I can live with it.  But what I never expected was not being able to watch that content if there was an issue with the serving of commercials.  I just hit this error message when trying to watch the latest episode of Lost.

No commercials, no free content for you!  I guess ABC feels strongly that you can’t have one without the other.

I have always relied on the design of others for my Wordpress site.  There are some really, really talented people out there and I’ve been very happy with the themes they provide.  But I decided to play with CSS a little and modified a Theme I found that happened to be a modification of someone else’s theme.

So Nikolaos Maounis started with the Simpla theme by Phu. He modified it and made it widget capable.  I then took Nikolaos’ theme and changed colors, fonts, etc. until I found a combination I liked.  I wanted something very simple, basic, elementary, two-column, easy to read, with a right sidebar.  I’m happy with it for now, but I’m sure this will wear off eventually.

Thank you to Nikolaos and Phu for creating work that the rest of us can learn from.  Nice work guys.

As I wrote about a few months ago, I started checking the Amazon MP3 store along with the iTunes Store when shopping for music, and I was surprised that most of what I was looking for was not only available from Amazon, it was cheaper as well.  Well, I have been buying more and more music lately and I can’t remember the last time I ended up buying it from the iTunes Store.  This is a huge change for me, but money talks.  I am getting individual songs a little cheaper, but I am usually getting full albums $2 cheaper.  That’s significant.  I still check with iTunes and I make sure to compare the number of tracks on the full album because once in a while iTunes has more songs for the money than Amazon does, but that has been really rare.

Apple, I realize you have the majority of the market share right now, but as one of your loyal customers that has way too many of your products than most people should, I think you have a problem here.  Not only do I have more Apple computers and iPods than any household should, I’m a share holder!  If I’m comfortable using another service over the iTunes Store what does that say for the average customer?  It may not be today, it may not be this year, but I think you need to address the pricing issue before others see what is going on and Amazon starts eating away at your market share.

I can’t believe I wrote about this a little over a year ago, but this just showed up again on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I thought it was so ironic that nothing had really changed in all that time that I thought I’d write abut it again.

It looks as though the decision on whether Pennsylvania will go smoke-free has been delayed yet again.  You can read about it here.  It’s business as usual when it comes to politics and Pennsylvania.