Category: Apple

MacBook Back Up Strategy Part 2

A couple years ago, I duct-tape-and-baling-twined a backup strategy together with rsync and ical with an offsite backup to the down defunct StrongSpace.

Since then, I’ve attempted to use Apple’s TimeMachine – both with a local drive and a driver connected to my AirPort Extreme.

Too frequently, I ended up corrupt backup files or the backups would completely fail. Additionally, when TimeMachine was running – my MacBook Pro would slow to an unusable crawl.

I’ve revisited my original rsync script to make a bootable, full-disk backup

Every night when I’m done working, I (manually, for the time being) kick off the rsync script in Terminal.app.

As of this writing it makes 3 backups of my MacBook Pro to 3 different drives; a full disk bootable backup, a user account backup to a portable drive, and a user account backup to a network drive (additionally it backs up my Kindle to the network drive).

Here’s the script

# RSYNC A BOOTABLE BACKUP ON THE FULL BACKUP DRIVE
sudo rsync -xrlptgoEv --progress --delete / /Volumes/Full_Backup_Drive_Name

# RSYNC MY USER ACCOUNT TO THE PORTABLE DRIVE
rsync -rltv --exclude='.*' ~/ /Volumes/Portable_Drive_Name/MacBookPro_Backup/

# RSYNC MY USER ACCOUNT TO THE NETWORK DRIVE
rsync -rltv --exclude='.*' ~/ /Volumes/Network_Drive_Name/MacBookPro_Backup/

On top of that, CrashPlan is backing up to both a networked drive and a portable drive.

Yes, I fully expect my MacBook Pro to completely die at any moment.

This post was inspired by Peter Fleck’s ‘Backing up is hard to do’

Hackintosh Success: OS X on Dell Mini 9

Dell Mini 9 Hackintosh

There’s been lots of chatter about the sub-$300 laptops, dubbed “netbooks” and their ability to run OS X. After reading through the How-To instructions on hacking OS X onto a Dell Mini, my initial thought was:

By Step 5, I’ve already paid for a used MacBook.

I picked up an 8GB Mini 9 for $250 from Dell a few weeks ago and after going through the process – I can confirm that’s the case.

Worst part is, in the end you don’t have a MacBook.

First off, I purchased the Mini without a optical drive (cause it’s 2009 & it’s a netbook). This means I need a Windows box for the installation. Which means, I need to turn on the the only Windows box in the house: a 6 year-old eMac with VirtualPC.

Hours later – after confirming all the hacky bits of software were transferred and configured correctly, I headed back to the Mini for the install.

Nope, 8GB isn’t enough room for even the basic OS X install.

So, I ordered a $120 32GB Runcore SSD upgrade (the Mini won’t boot off it’s SSD slot).

Then, install the hardware upgrade, re-attempt the OS install, do a funny reboot dance (twice for good measure) and….Success.

Time to migrate the account information from the PowerBook….well, what will fit in <32 GB.

A long, complex, ill-documented, technically fragile process and in the end – a Hackintosh….definitely not a Macintosh.

But hey, sometimes the first piece of pie is the hardest to get out. The second always goes much more easily.

Published
Categorized as Apple

iPod Touch 2nd Generation 16GB: First Impressions

A couple weeks back, I picked up a 2nd Generation Apple iPod Touch – partially so I could start playing with web apps for it and partially cause my much beloved 3rd Gen 40gig iPod is starting to flake out.

I’ve been primarily for programming-related movies (PeepCode, SDRuby, and Pragmatic Programers), a calendar & address book, and some ongoing mobile experiments.

Compared to a Palm device, the iPod Touch is a far better experience. No question. As a music player compared against my iPod Nano or 40gig – it’s a miserable failure – especially in the car. Even as a video player it’s awkward if only because video and audio are treated differently in terms of navigation and rating.

The ‘slide to unlock’ gesture is the most elegant, convenient way to wake a device up – far better than the 2 key combo sequence phones require.

I was surprised to see the iPod Touch doesn’t have a camera. I fully expected it to. The omission makes me think the iPhone is far more heavily subsidized by AT&T than I originally calculated.

I’ve added a only a small handful of free apps from the App Store, and deleted all but 3 of them; Alocola, Fring, and WordPress (which may be deleted shortly.)

The apps the iPod ships with fared about as well, but I can’t delete them easily, which makes me grumbly.

Mail is nearly worthless for anything more than 1 (non-.me, non-Google) account, because there’s no rolled-up aggregate view of mail and it relies on server-side spam filtering.

Calendar is such a nice app. Good monthly and list views, easy to move events around and update their information. This is best calendar I’ve worked with.

Maps – Google Maps itself is an amazing piece of technology, then wrapped into tiny, tiny, highly-mobile Apple computer – astounding. There are a couple oddities I’ve found though; when I ‘drop pin’, ‘edit bookmark’ is the action for changing the name of the pin’s location (shouldn’t it be ‘edit pin’ or ‘edit location’) also, I haven’t figured out how to access my list of pins/bookmarks. Any idea?

Stocks, YouTube, Music, Clock, iTunes Music Store, Mail, and Settings have all been relegated to a secondary app screen, cause that’s most effective way to hide them.

Overall, I’m ‘eh’ on the device. It still has what I consider the iPod’s fatal flaw – required tethering to iTunes (my phone can update wirelessly from across the room, why do the iPod need to be plugged in?) and I’m not sure what – aside from basic PDA and media playback – I’d want applications on the device to do.

So, the numbers in the AppStore Secrets report from PinchMedia don’t surprise me (punch line: apps have ~30 day lifespan).

The New Apple Product Dilemma

Apple’s been great about keeping their product offerings simple and straight forward. Historically, the biggest question when deciding on which Apple computer to purchase was:

Do I want the power & storage of a desktop or the portability of a laptop?

Even today, the prices between a 2.4GHz iMac and a similarly spec’d 2.0GHz Mac Book differ by only $125 ($1274 vs $1399 respectively).

At that price difference portability easily wins over processor speed.

Today, the same dilemma exists between the iPhone and the iPod Touch.

Do I want the power & storage of the iPod Touch or the persistent connection of the iPhone?

16GB iPhone: $1979.751
16GB iPod Touch: $299

Wow. I didn’t expect that.

Since I’m not excited about being an AT&T customer again and am good with WiFi as my network – I guess it’s not really a dilemma. Huh.

🙂

1. $299 + (($30 AT&T iPhone data plan + $39.99 AT&T 450 min/mn voice plan) * 24 month contract).

iPhone: Must Have Show Stoppers

Last week, I wrote: “For every really cool thing the iPhone has, there’s a really lame thing. 3G even more so.”

Abi Jones asked me to draw up the list.

This is the first pass at the list. I’m expecting corrections and additions, especially post-July 11.

Cool Lame
From Apple From AT&T
Lower device cost Can’t purchase online. Higher monthly rates.
Custom, iPhone-specific Apps Delivered via iTunes
Syncs data with other computers Except for iCal To Dos and iPhone Notes
Internet connection when outside of wifi No tethering internet connection to a laptop or VOIP calling

Thinking About iPhone Web Apps for the Enterprise

Apple’s initial iPhone application model (build a decent website) is brilliant. Websites are easily the fastest, most compatible, most maintainable, most popular, way to create software applications. Once Apple supported adding specific website’s to the icons on the iPhone’s home screen, you’ve got the equivalent of applications on the Palm Treo – with internet access required, sure.

Doesn’t (or shouldn’t) this model cover 97% of all software?

The alternative is learning Objective-C, the development language in OS X and the amazingly popular GNUStep. Um. While not exactly wide reaching, this should increase the demand for ObjC developers.

For the commitment to ObjC, what to you get?
Some deeper ties into the iPhone’s hardware capabilities and iTunes as only distribution method.

In a client meeting earlier this week the team mentioned how the project needed to be available on mobile devices for internal use.


This brought to mind the Symbol barcode scanner running Palm’s OS and the handheld devices package delivery people at UPS and FedEx use.

Could they be replaced with an iPhone?

Maybe.

“Most road warriors could use Web-based tools with little loss in productivity.” – Phil Windley

Scanning an object’s barcode and manipulating data about it by multi-touch is a very compelling vision – whether on sales floor or in the warehouse.

On the flip side, I have a hard time imaging signing for a package on an iPhone…or enterprises IT departments agreeing to push out updates to a iPhone-native app via iTunes.

MacBook Air: How We Really Use Computers

2 years ago when I predicted Apple would drop the optical drive, didn’t expect them to drop everything except the power cord as well.

Options for the MacBook Air include: an optical drive (SuperDrive), ethernet adapter, and a modem.

Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I used any of those things on my current machine s anyway (save the mini that’s now the house DVD player).

I love that Apple released a machine that’s honest about how we use computers today, without apologizing for yesterday. Though, I’m on a annual battery-replacement cycle for all my Apple *Books and iPods, I’m not digging the non-replaceable battery.

At >$3k for the high-end version – the MBA is already the must-have device of the year.

Leopard Installs Not Always Problem Free

After the customary until-you-cant-take-it-anymore 30-minute waiting period, I installed 10.5 Leopard on the Mac mini that serves my local network.

The mini isn’t my primary work machine, and it’s regular duties are fairly straight forward: transport backups, be invisible.

As such, the upgrade was quick and straight-forward (but I wasn’t really paying attention, I was working while all this was going on). After restarting the it was back. I poked around a little, started investigating CalendarServer and decided that the spit-and-polish on the UI would in fact make me more productive1 so I started the upgrade on my primary workstation.

This was a bad idea.

After the intial upgrade, one of the handful of third-party PreferencePanes or Startup Items sent the Finder into an infinite loop of crash and relaunch and crash and relaunch repeat until hard restart.

Two re-upgrades later, I determined it wasn’t bad installs, and firewire-moded into trash anything that may be interfering with the Startup process2.

While this process gave me Leopard, I’m still recovering days later. Not yet back to where I was in Tiger.

The archive+install ate my /local directory, so I needed to re-install svn and mysql (thankfully I left myself a reminder). The ruby mysql gem needed to be recompiled and I’v lost my VPN configuration. All of which were running just fine previously.

There are 3 more Macs in the house scheduled for upgrades. None of which I’m prepared to dedicate the same amount of time on as my primary machine. Yes, I’m gun shy.

1. There’s a Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field for you.
2. M-Audio, Wacom, and Tivo are all suspects.

RSS Everywhere: Mail.app

Rex Hammock confirms Mac OS X 10.5’s Mail.app supports reading RSS. While I’ve yet to see Apple implement RSS in a smart way, RSS in Mail.app proves RSS support will be ubiquitous.

Just as I mentioned last month.

Can’t wait to see if Mail.app is a better podcast-receiver than iTunes.

If you’ve got Leopard installed – is it easy to dynamically add an RSS item (title, link, etc) to an email sig dynamically?