Inklet and pogo sketch

I received these a quickly after ordering them online and have been playing for a few days.

They are a going to take some getting used to. Here's the slightly longer story :

1) The stick is dumb - there's no bluetooth back to the host as its really just a miniaturized finger. The iPhone screen and the MBP touchpad are hard wired to recognize fingers, and that's what's the pogo sketch stick emulates.

2) The Inklet app for the MBP is pretty clever. Would I use this for say OmniGraffle work ? I'm not sure. I'm not sure that the touchpad on the MBP in combination with the pogo sketch is good enough to make to reasonably accurate placement of pixels. I'll give it some more time though.

3) On the iPhone, with the acclaimed Layers app the pogo sketch is fantastic.

That last leads me to think there's a fantastic iPhone app coming from Ten One Design that works over wifi/bluetooth with Inklet that gives you live on-iPhone sketching of a MacBook app (Photoshop, OmniGraffle). The applicable MBP rectangle painted on the iPhone, and two-finger operations would work as you expect to zoom in or out. There are some truly fantastic possibilities there.

Some of the technologies have already been show-cased. Google for ethernet mouse and keyboard.

Belkin backpack worn out after 11 months

Used daily for work: a Belkin slim backpack

The fabric was obviously too thin on the back and is now worn through after 11 months.

Other items like a plastic "Belkin" label have also split open just from normal use.

Don't buy this backpack.

Apple TV death.

My Apple TV is dead. All it does is blink-yellow on boot and never progresses to anything other than that. I suspected overheating as this was long an issue with it. Also I never knew of the suspend functionality (play key on the remote for six seconds) as it was not in the manual.

There are Apple Remote key sequences you can do to restart it, but they have no effect on it. The battery was good in the remote (it works elsewhere), so I dragged the thing into the Apple Store (you book a Genius bar appointment as a "Mac" as there is no special channel for an atv).

The helpful fellow took it out the back and plugged it into his TV. Ten minutes later we have a result - its dead. It is also 18 months old so well and truly out of warranty. My choices are (1) get a reconditioned 40Mb one (thats what this is) from Apple for about $165 as a replacement, or buy a new one for $229. The latter is $160Gb capacity, but otherwise it is the original 1Ghz Pentium class CPU design.

I chose option three. Wait for something new to come out soon. Dual ARM chips please!!!!!! But also to take apart the atv at home and see if something was not right with its insides.

OK, so the hard drive is fine. I put it in a caddy and it mounts when connected to my MBP. There are three volumes and the bigger two are HFS+ (a particularly fragile file system). Disk Utility verifies them fine. The first partition must be used for factory resets and the MBP did not know what it was let alone whether it is corrupt.

The fan works, therefore the power pack works. There are no loose connections and no reset button with a "click this if overheated". Thus I'll toss it in the recycling trash can.

Yet another Apple item that falls short of a five year goal for consumer electronics.

Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) useless after firmware upgrade

I upgraded the firmware using Airport Utility on Snow Leopard to 7.4.2, and the thing would not connect to the AT&T ADSL after that.

Debugging

I have a working Airport Express so I was able to copy every setting for TCP/IP, DHCP and alike but it would never connect again to the modem. The Airport Express works well, so I took my time researching the issues with the AEBS. I was not alone, others have part functioning ones that don't pipe data to/from the ADSL. "Ethernet Unplugged" seems a common issue.

Apple Store

In the San Francisco Apple store, with a Genius advising I find out that there's no repair available for a $169 item out of warranty. I buy a $99 Express (now has 802.11n whereas the older one I use for travel has the slower 802.11g only). I leave the old one with them; Cupertino might want to use it to help improve the line, but I'm told there is no mechanism to get them back to head office.

Ponzi Scheme

I'm increasingly coming to believe that Apple items are not designed to last three years. In fact I think they're running a an electronics Ponzi scheme. Sales for next year will cover warranty for this year. Similarly for those disgruntled outside of the warranty period, there is the allure of something better for effectively less to reduce the pain of writing the dead item off.

My advice? - buy the cheapest Apple products you can get away with. Don't buy multifuction devices. For example the TimeMachine versions of the AEBS seem to be a double trouble proposition. Ditto iMacs.

QuickPwn zips through the jail-breaking of an iPhone 2G.  Well, it hangs for me on an dialog that iTunes is sending "An iPhone has been detected, but could not be identified properly. Please disconnect the iPhone, then try again. An unknown error occurred (2001)".

It was a blocker until I read somewhere to put a USB hub inline, now it carries on, and the dialog is benign.  I could not find the option to get iTunes to just shut up while the iPhone was power cycling under QuickPwn control.  

Still its fixed now.

All this to get to be able to use a different SIM in a different country on vacation.  There's a European rule that forces handset makers to divulge unlock know-how after an initial contract period expires.  Lets see if Apple ignore that when the 3G folks in Europe come to the end of the their initial contracts.

Mail.app paste of image -> TIFF <- sucks

I never want to send a tiff in email.

I'd rather copy/paste as JPG.

Where is the preference in Mail.app ?

  -> paste images as   TIFF | JPG | GIF | PNG

Apple TV upgrade not upgradeable itself

Upgrade to 2.0 .... try upgrading to 2.1 : forget it, there is a bug whereby it can't download the 2.1 software. Rebooting the AppleTV does not work, nor does sitting there pressing it 80 times.

Restoring to Factory settings does - meaning back to version 1.0 before forward to version 2.1

Lame.