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.

.Mac sync craziness - Microsoft could have done better

More needless policing from .Mac in respect of syncing files.  

I do have two Macs. The other has not been on for a week, whereas this one I use daily. 

.Mac is telling me there's a conflict.  Its wrong there is no conflict. Indeed there are not 76 conflicts.  It sees some incompatibility between file times on the server versus my MacBook Pro.  

I guess both use NTP for time synchronization, so this is confusing. 

More confusing perhaps as this did no

t popup yesterday or last week as an issue, and I've done nothing to affect this.

Then it vetoes my attempt to choose "use most recent version" making you wonder why it could not have known that in advance.

Lastly, why can't it understand something about the contents of a file.  That's revision control 101, and Apple seem to have missed it.  These files have not changed, its just that the dates are a little askew.

Apple pay your developers a bit more, and fix your usability bugs will ya.  Jeez, Microsoft could have done better.

There is a problem syncing the file "About your iDisk.rtf"

Can't see it in Finder of course, but from the command line it's like so:

    -rwxr-xr-x+   1 paul staff       64393 Mar 16   2007 About your iDisk.rtf

Its the extraneous + on the permissions that is wrong.  It gets restored properly to my local system when I sudo/rm the file. 

Good work Apple. 

Two MBPs, same problem, same stretch of freeway, same day

Yesterday, my MBP just froze on my journey to work.  I waited five minutes then powered it off. On reboot, it just sat on the boot screen with an Apple logo and the spinner going.  Further reboots just took me to the same place.

You can see multiple people talk about similar things in discussion forums.  

That was my corporate MacBookPro and my personal one was fine (but sulking from non-use) and it was able to see the failed Mac's hard drive in target mode.  Only after thinking about mounting it for 2 mins, and issuing a warning (which I cannot recall the wording to), did it mount in read-only mode.

My colleague Alex Chaffee arrived in work an hour later and reported the same problem encountered on the same stretch of freeway.  He could see his drive in target-mode his too. 

Mine the phammant.sparsebundle 'folder' had moved out of /Users/phammant/ and gone to the /Users/ directory.  I could copy the whole sparsebundle thing off the dead mac and onto the good one over firewire.  Mounting it was easy :

  hdiutil attach /path/to/sparesebundle

This morning my personal MBP froze on the journey to work (but rebooted fine). It froze last night too.  It does not have the sparsebundle stuff activated and is a completely different install of Leopard.  I have had that keyboard-driver death thing for a while, and applied the firmware upgrade - but it still happens.  Y'all know to press and hold a key for 30 seconds to reboot the driver for the dead keyboard right? 

While typing this posting, the MBP hang a second time this morning (but reboots).  The first thing to try (after waiting for a few minutes for it to recover) is Command, Control & the Power key.  That makes it attempt a soft reboot, whereas the power key on its own, triggers a potentially hard-drive harming sudden power-off.

This morning my corporate MBP has been re-imaged.  It passed all memory/drive/drive controller tests overnight.  I've yet to reinstall important stuff though.  Alex's has been re-imaged, but the saved .sparsebundle dir is not remounting in situ. He's going to have to mount it the same way I have and copy over stuff manually.

Thanks a bunch Apple!  You recently tossed your stability out of the window it seems.

MacBookBook: Make your own MacBook Air sleeve from a Coffee Table book

First you need a 14" x 10" coffee table book. Best to hit a second hand store for that rather than take something your really cherish.

<- This is actually the finished product with the MacBook Air inside, but it could

 as easily be the starting point.  

Your first problem is that you find the book you just bought really interesting, and feel guilty cutting it up. Most of the pages I took out were intact, so there is a possibility that I could frame the better prints (meaning I could feel less guilty).

 

With a craft knife, cut out the center of book ->

The MBA is 13" by 9" and about 0.7" deep.  the recess in the book needs to be that bit, plus a little more to get it in and out.  In my case I cut the pages first before glueing, but the other way around could work if you had a Dremel (and a dust mask as there would likely be lots). 

The MBA is thicker at the back than the front. I mirrored this in the page cutting near the bottom on the book. The red edge in the picture is what remains of the front most page.  The three wide inch sheep page is first page near the bottom where the cutout was not complete. Each successive page deeper was a little wider.  

Gluing was hardest as its important that you glue the pages in a way that makes most sense when the book is closed. A book's spine is designed to allow pages to remain open if the book is open, but this project is different in that its not a book anymore and we need it to work best closed.  Thus keep the spine of the book in the position it would be if it were closed (at 90 degrees to the surface you are working on).  I used a glue stick with glue that went on blue and dried to clear. As the pages were high gloss and colorful to the edge, I wanted to be sure that the glue went in the right places.

<- the pages do not really line up perfectly after gluing.  Also its pretty apparent in this picture that some weight was going to need to be applied to the pages to reduce some of the rippling that had happened with imperfect line-up of each successive page.  As it happens I ripped out one page in every 20 completely, knowing that the glue would make the book thicker than when the project started out.

 

I lined the cutout with felt from an art supplies store ->

The tongue sticking out is to help lift the MBA out of what is quite a snug fit.  

This 'case' is not really for shock-absorbing as the case is designed for home use not travel - there is nothing to stop the book cover opening other than gravity.  

It is also unsuitable for a bookshelf use.

<- Here is the MBA in situ.  Note that the tongue to lift it our with is a little long.  

You can't quite see it but the MBA is perfectly adjusted height-wise, thanks to the extra recess for it being thicker at the back.  

The finished product is about the same weight as the original book. 

The only think I'd like to do to it is add some velcro, so that there is a chance it could survive a small tumble.