I brought my Macbook Pro into the local Apple store genius bar. (Had an appointment) I told them I wanted them to run a hardware diagnostic because my laptop wouldn’t boot but only show a checkboard pattern over the grey Apple logo. (See my previous post)

They plugged in a USB drive, booted from the drive. It ran some program that checked my graphics chip, saw that was defective. This defect was covered beyond the normal warranty. They took my information and sent my laptop off to their repair depot to be fixed.

Looks like I may get it back before the end of the week too.

Good customer experience.

If you have any thoughts on which of these are better, post them in the comments.

Twitter Clients for Mac

The launch was absolutely stunning. With the setting sun shining on the exhaust plume from the shuttle you had reds/oranges and whites framed against the blue of the sky. This pictures don’t do the sight justice, but I hope you enjoy.

Currently on my Mac I just use the web interface. It works, but would like something that could browse my photos in Aperture more easily.

I always like games that come with accessories. Although is it still a game if you get a workout while you’re having fun? I don’t know, but it’s close enough for me. Either way, it comes with accessories, and I think they are a simple but innovative way to use the Wii controls.

By the way, what is it exactly that makes Bob Greene so popular?

There is a page of videos if you want to know more.

It’s bound to at least be a cult classic. If you like innovative games, please help spread the news and give it a chance to be much more than that.

Thanks

Hulu just asked Boxee to remove Hulu. What’s next, will they ask Safari to remove Hulu?
http://origin-blog.hulu.com/2009/2/18/doing-hard-things

I never watched Hulu before Boxee. I don’t expect to watch it after. I like to watch tv shows on a *gasp* TV. But hey, go ahead and turn away your fans. There will be plenty of other services to take your place.

A picture of the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson taken by someone on the ferry to go rescue the passengers.
There’s a plane in the Hudson..

So I’ve decided to take the nuclear option and do a full restore of the phone and see if that helps anything. I won’t be surprised if it doesn’t help. I also won’t be surprised if the iPhone doesn’t restore my data properly like after my firmware upgrade.
But I’ve created a duplicate copy of the backup folder to give me some measure of safety (since Time Machine is defective by design and doesn’t back up that folder).

Wish me luck…

On Sep 14, 2008, at 6:19 PM, Richard wrote:

Steve,
I’m writing this letter to let you know of my recent disappointment with using Time Machine (with Time Capsule) and how it failed to backup and restore some critical files.
Time Machine is billed as a device that makes it so that “you’ll never have to worry about backing up again.” Unfortunately, in my moment of need, Time Machine didn’t work.
It was not able to restore some files that I need because it decided not to backup those specific files. In other words, it didn’t even do it’s job, while giving the appearance of working.

In particular, Time Machine doesn’t back up the MobileSync directory which is where all of your iPhone data is stored. I have some critical data on my iPhone that I appear to have lost due to this problem.

I’d ask you to please change Time Machine so that it does back up this directory so other people don’t run into the problem that I have.
I also would ask that you improve the iPhone restore process so that people can restore data from any of their backups. (Which you can’t right now)
Finally, and most importantly, I also would appreciate it if you have any ideas of any other ways that I can recover my data. If not, I would appreciate some type of compensation for my Time Capsule not working.

I just want to scream with frustration as it appears I won’t be able to recover my data even though I thought I was taking the necessary steps to protect myself.

Here is my story:

The upgrade:
On the night of Sept 13th I decided to upgrade to firmware 2.1 (This is an original iPhone that I bought at the iPhone launch)
I made sure to sync my iPhone before upgrading so that all of my data would be backed up. (Even though everytime you sync the iPhone it says that it is backing up your data I later found out that you can’t actually restore that data)
I then selected to upgrade my phone.

The problem:
After the process finished I noticed that some of the applications were missing from my iPhone. In particular, I had bought a password application called SplashID where I store all my critical passwords and it was gone. I started to get a little scared, because it contains critical information that I don’t have anywhere else.
I went into iTunes and saw that SplashID was still in iTunes, so I tried syncing the phone again.
This didn’t fix anything.
I then went back to iTunes and selected “Get Info” on the application. When I did this, it said that it couldn’t find the application, and provided me a file dialog box to find it. I knew that the applications are stored in the iTunes library, so I found the app in the “Mobile Applications” folder within the iTunes folder.
I then synchronized the phone again and was happy to see the application was now on the phone.
Unfortunately, when I ran the application, all of my passwords were GONE! Now I was really starting to get nervous.

The iPhone backs up, doesn’t it? Not really.
I remembered that the iPhone claims to be backing up my data every time I sync, and I sync quite often, so all I should have to do is restore one of those backups.
I went to iTunes and selected “Restore from Backup…”
For some reason, despite the fact that I sync nearly every day, only three backups were listed: iPhone, Richard’s iPhone – 07/10/08, and Richard’s iPhone – 07/13/08
Here I made a mistake. It was late at night and so for some reason I misread 07/13/08 as 09/13/08 and thought it was the backup from when I had synced earlier in the day.
So I picked that backup and restored it to my iPhone.

I then went to my iPhone and saw that SplashID had some of my data but it was very old and missing a lot of data. I then realized that I had restored the wrong backup.
I tried to restore from the iPhone backup, but it just put me back in the situation I had been before with the data gone.

Time machine should have been my hero.
Now I was really starting to panic as I thought my data might be gone, but I knew that I had one more trick to pull. Time Machine!
I could just restore the iPhone backup directory from yesterday, then restore the backup on my iPhone and everything would be fixed.
So then I went into Time Machine only to find that the directory isn’t backed up. I did some research on the internet and discovered that Time Machine specifically is set not to backup this directory.
To be quite honest, I was disgusted that a product that I bought to backup my computer, didn’t in fact back it up.

So now here I am, not knowing how to get my passwords back for my banking, trading, and computer accounts. About 81 passwords gone. I guess I just am going to have to pay the money and time to manually reset / change all these accounts.

There is one last hope? In the iPhone backup directory there are .mdbackup files that appear to be from previous sync’s (i.e. they have the timestamp)
One of these appears to contain the data for my passwords, but I don’t know how to get it back on the phone because when iTunes restores, it only uses the most recent data. (And the data is encrypted so I can’t just look at it on the computer and reenter the data manually)

Thank you for your time.
Again, if you could put me in touch with someone who could help me restore the old .mdbackup files to my iPhone I would be very grateful.
But for now, the only conclusion that I have is that I shouldn’t trust Apple products. (Which is disappointing given the investment I have made in Apple products)

Richard

I clicked on the link to show me the available update and it proceeds to the “My App Updates” screen where it shows that I have something like 47 updates available. It shows all the updates, and some applications show up in the updates list multiple times. Huh?

I looked in my iTunes folder and many of the applications have duplicate copies that appear to be the same (i.e. they are the same size).

So near as I can tell, updates for iPhone applications are completely hosed for me. (On a side note, on the phone it shows 2 application updates available. Three cheers for inconsistency!)

And I’ll leave you with a screenshot of the fun:

iTunes iPhone Application Updates

Setup only requires your name and password and you are ready to post.

You can work on your post, save it as a local draft and post it whenever you are ready.

Pictures can be added from the iPhone library or from the camera.

Finally, you can see a preview of the page at any time.

That’s all the features. Simple, functional, and well done.

Highly recommended.

Update:

On my blog the uploading of images doesn’t work quite right. It puts the picture in a different directory than it references it from.

Update 2:
This is a bug in the application. Basically it doesn’t respect the “Store uploads in this folder” parameter if you have changed it from the default. So if you are having a problem with the Wordpress iPhone application and pictures showing up in your posts make sure that you have that set to the default setting (It can be found under Settings->Miscellaneous).

The Time Capsule is a network device that is supposed to work in conjunction with Apple’s Time Machine backup software to backup your computer wirelessly on a regular basis. It also serves as a 802.11n access point that I’ve been using to provide access to our laptops.

Ever since I first installed it I’ve had problems with Time Machine not working very well. I hooked up my laptop via ethernet for the initial backup (which is large) and then switched to 802.11n for the incremental backups. However the incremental backups never seemed to be working correctly. It would spend hours just trying to start the backup (“Preparing” stage), and then an equally long time doing a relatively small backup.

Finally, yesterday my wife told me that that our slingplayer wasn’t working at all with her laptop in the bedroom.

Sure enough, despite having a strong wifi signal I was seeing a large number of packets dropped. In fact, I was seeing these when I was quite near the Time Capsule.

Could this be the problem with my Time Machine backups as well?

After a lot of troubleshooting I ended up doing a hard reset. (Unplug the power cable and plug it back in while holding down the reset button). This completely resets the firmware settings, but doesn’t affect the harddrive (or the backups on them).

I then reconfigured the Time Machine the way I needed it.

Since then it appears to be working much better. I’m not seeing packet loss, the backups seem to be working and the slingplayer is working.
Hopefully this does the trick.

What do you think?

There were three main reasons that I was anticipating the new firmware.
- Activesync for work.
- VPN for work
- App store so that I could finally transfer all my passwords from my Treo to my iPhone and get rid of the Treo

How have my expectations been met?

Activesync:
Mail works great. It does exactly what I would want. Give me easy access to my work mail without having to go through webmail. And you can even easily disable the mail syncing, so if you have days where you need to turn off work it’s not that hard to do.

Calendar and Contacts however are disappointing to me. I like to keep my work contacts and calendar separate from my personal contacts and calendar. As far as I can tell, you can’t do this. Bummer, because I really wanted easy access to my work calendar.’

VPN works great. Cisco IPSec with two factor authentication works exactly like I would expect.

Finally, the app store and a password application. I bough a program called SplashID. It could use some improvements in the interface department, but it does the job, so I’m fairly happy with this.

Biggest disappointment? The new long backup times (Which is apparently due to backing up applications)

Biggest positive surprise? The Apple remote application actually is useful for me.

iTunes started up like normal, but for some reason it didn’t start the sync process. I clicked on the iPhone in iTunes and instead of showing the iPhone page it shows a full window advertisment for Apple’s MobileMe service.

Now I’m not against advertising. I think it’s a perfectly good way to help pay for products. However, when advertising completely interrupts the normal functionality of a device I think it’s gone too far. Often I will insert my iPhone for a sync and then walk away to do something else. Later I’ll come back, grab my iPhone and head out the door. If I had done that this time, my phone and data would not have been safely backed up like I would have expected.

On the SDK front it features the same dev environment as Mac OSX. Including Xcode, remote debugging, remote profiling, and even an iPhone simulator.

Getting a new program up and running on the simulator is pretty easy, especially for those of you who already have experience with objective c programming.
You can download the SDK and starting messing around without needing to drop the $99 to become an official iPhone developer.

There are a few things that I think are important that I haven’t had a chance to determine yet.
Does iPhone support obj c 2.0 and garbage collection? My assumption is yes but the samples don’t seem to use garbage collection at least.
I also want to know how data files are transferred from iPhone to PC as part of sync. I.E. How can a mac app access data saved on the iPhone?

Support for all of this is coming as part of firmware 2.0 which won’t ship till June. Hope you have some patience.

It’s a great use of time as a key game play element.

If you are at all interested in video games, this is one that you are obligated to try it out.

If you like sports trivia or sports talk radio, this is the game for you. It has a live DJ, sports trivia questions based on current events, and best of all, it’s free!!

To download it, go to http://www.eagameshow.com

If you want see what it’s like, check out this funsize version. It’s not the full game and doesn’t have the live questions and DJ, but it will give you a good idea of what the game is like.

I thought one of the biggest announcements was Microsoft’s Xbox Live Community games. Providing a forum for people who aren’t official game developers to get exposure to their video games is a big deal, and quite frankly I was surprised that they didn’t allow this when they first announced the XNA Creators Club.

Although it’s a bit of a convoluted process to actually download the games, the first ones are already up. I’ve played some of them. Have you?

So I just got a reply from Apple (I entered it as a bug in the developer bug tracker). Their reply was that my camera, a Sanyo Xacti HD700, is not supported.

The funny thing, is that when looking for this camera I was specifically looking for one that had support for Mac.

Oh well, at least I have an easy workaround.

Here are the details I sent Apple:

Summary:
When I import from my Sanyo Xacti HD700 using “Import from Camera…” the import quality has significant blocking / compression artifacts. However, if I copy the same file off the SD card from the camera and play it back in QTplayer it does not have this same blocking / compression artifacts.
The file is a .MP4 container using H.264 codec for video and AAC for audio. The resolution is 1280×720p and framerate 30fps.

After spending a significant portion of time messing around with iMovie 08 trying to get it to import without the quality loss I have discovered that “Import from Camera…” and “Import Movies…” have different behavior (in terms of video quality) on the SAME FILE.

Steps to reproduce:
1) Record a video with Sanyo Xacti HD700 camera. (One with a nice color gradient is good because it will make the compression artifacts more obvious).
2) Import the video from the camera using “Import from Camera…” (Name the event “Import from Camera” so you can remember which is which)
3) Copy the .MP4 file from the mounted drive onto your local harddrive. (Not sure if this step is actually necessary, but haven’t tried without)
4) Import the video from the .MP4 on your desktop using “Import Movies…” (Name the event “Import Movies”) Notice that this completes much quicker than step 2.
5) Find the two imported movies in your “iMovie Events” folder. You will notice that both movies are different sizes when you would expect them to be identical. (In my case the movie from “Import from Camera” was 47.4MB while the movie from “import movies” was 33.1MB, and the file on the SD card was 33.1 MB)
6) At this point you will also notice that the movie imported from camera will have a custom name like clip-2007-12-26 14;41;44.mov while the movie from “import movies” will have the same filename as it did on the camera i.e SANY0025.MP4.
7) Now open both files in QTplayer and arrange them side by side showing the same frame. You will see that the quality is much worse in the file from “Import from Camera”.

Expected results:
I expect that the quality of the imported file would be identical, regardless of whether I use “Import from camera…” or “Import Movies…” when I am importing from the same file.

Actual results:
The quality of the imported file is degraded when using “Import from camera…”

Hypothesis (i.e. the part that will make the Software Engineers laugh :
My guess is that when you select “Import from Camera” it does some transcoding on these files that it doesn’t do when you select “Import Movies”. (Maybe Import from Camera always transcodes, whereas Import Movies checks to see if it needs to transcode or not?) I believe this because it takes significantly longer using the “Import from Camera” during which time it would appear to be performing some type of transformation on the movie. Also, because the file name in the folder is different.
I believe that either this transcoding is flawed or of poor quality which leads to the poor quality video when importing.

Work around:
Use “Import Movies…” instead of “Import from Camera…”

Here is a thread which contains a screengrab of the two movies side by side in QTplayer on the same frame. The one on the left was imported with “Import from Camera” and the one on the right with “Import Movies”. Look at the right side of the yellow playset and also at the hair. In motion it looks quite bad.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1313567&tstart=0

However, I’m guessing that when while techshorts gathered dust that people wandered away.

So does anyone actually read this site who isn’t related to me? Leave a comment if you do.

You can download a free trial from Apple.
I’ve already ordered my copy.

Interested, but not sure if it’s the right thing for you? Check out the tutorials.

The paper with the research: http://www.faculty.idc.ac.il/arik/imret.pdf
A windows application implementation of the technique: http://peterw.000webhost.com/resizor/index.html

Wouldn’t it be great if you’re favorite mobile browser could do that on webpages? Especially the ones that waste space on the window borders.

Happy New Year!

My iPhone had been modded by adding some custom ringtones.
Prior to the update I removed the custom ringtones (using the same application that I had used to add them: iFuntastic).
I also imported all my photos as I had heard I might lose them otherwise.
iTunes indicated it was preparing the iPhone for the Software update and then it reported back an error. (I assume that it detected some difference on my iPhone due to the modding). It then put the iPhone in the “restore” state and prompted me to do a complete restore.

So here goes…
Wonder if I am going to lose my notes.

Interesting. It’s downloading the iPhone software update even though I had already downloaded it.
I’m happy I didn’t try to do this update when I was on the road last week since I had pretty unreliable internet connectivity.

Now iTunes is “Waiting for iPhone…”. The iPhone is showing the apple boot logo and the spinning gear.
Preparing iPhone for restore, “Restoring iPhone software…”, “Verifying iPhone software…”, “Verifying iPhone restore…”, “Restoring iPhone firmware…”

“Your iPhone has been restored to factory settings and is restarting”…

Ok, now my iPhone went back to the screen saying it need to be activated.
iTunes went to a screen prompting me to setup as a new iPhone or restore from the backup of my iPhone.
Also, my iPhone now says that it has been activated.
I’m choosing to restore.

“The settings for the iPhone have been restored”…

Ok, now it is having to resynchronize everything I had on it. (Contacts, music, movies, photos, calendar) This is going to take a while.

…

…

Ok, it’s finally done syncing.

Seems to have restored nearly everything.
It restored my notes. It of course restored all of the items that I syncronize with the Mac (contacts including favorites, calendar, music, etc.)
It did not restore my wi-fi passwords. (That’s ok)
It did not restore the state of deleted email. (i.e. it redownloaded some email from my mail servers that I had already deleted on the phone).

So far I’d say that it worked fairly well.
I guess I should probably reinstall my custom ringtones now.
Probably also should learn more about what changes the modding actually makes so that I know what I need to revert so that future updates will think that I haven’t modded the phone.

Under specific conditions, adding a new album to Aperture will change the albums that are selected for synchronization in iTunes

To reproduce:
Make sure you have an Aperture library with several projects that contain albums.
In addition, make sure you have some folders that are at the root level and contain albums. (i.e. the folders are not inside a project)
For example:
Project 1
-Project1Album1
-Project1Album2
Project2
-Project2Album1
-Project2Album2
-Project2Album3
Folder1
-Folder1SmartAlbum1
-Folder1SmartAlbum2
-Folder1SmartAlbum3
Folder2
-Folder2SmartAlbum1

Now, go into iTunes and in the iPhone settings, set the iPhone to sync photos from Aperture.
Select the “Selected Albums” radio button.
Select the following Albums to have a checkbox so they will be synchronized to the iPhone:
“In the last month” (A built in Aperture Album)
“Folder1SmartAlbum2″
“Folder2SmartAlbum1″

Now synchronize your iPhone with iTunes.
Now close iTunes
Go to Aperture.
Now create a new album in one of the projects. I.e. “Project1Album3″ and import some photos into it.
Now restart iTunes.
Go to the iPhone photos tab.
You will notice that now that the following albums are selected for syncing:
“In the last month” (A built in Aperture Album)
“Folder1SmartAlbum1″ <- Notice that this is not what you had originally selected
“Folder1SmartAlbum3″ <- Notice that this is not what you had originally selected

You can see that the albums that are set to sync have changed even though you did not change them.
The correct behavior is that the albums you originally selected to synchronize should stay selected.

To me it appears like iTunes is using an index to reference which Albums the user has checked to be synchronized. This if you insert an album prior to an album that has been selected for synchronization the index will now be incorrect. The incorrect index will reference the previous album instead of the correct one. It should be using a name to reference albums, because adding and removing albums is something the user is likely to do. (In my case I add a new album every time I import a set of photos).

Today is a good day to give thanks for what we have as a nation and to remember to be vigilant of threats to restrict or limit our freedom, both internal and external.

It will be interesting to see what form the “programming system” that Nintendo refers to will take.

Don’t have a Mac yet? Well, they have program for windows to read the Wii-mote as well: WiinRemote

For other drivers, check out WiiLi.org

I only have the wireless controllers, so haven’t tried it out, but it sounds cool!

You can find some great info on Bagelturf

I’ve had a few problems with crashes myself, so you might want to read the Aperture Discussion forums before jumping on the upgrade.

Does anyone have any good tips for how to change the date of a photo in Aperture?

This e-coupon (that is going to benefit the crucial early adopter crowd) is an example of one of the things that help Apple retain the devotion of their fans.

An unexpected suprise that turns an upgrade and price change into a decidedly more positive event.
Now lets see how the upgrade holds up.

Aperture 1.1 has been released.

It is supposed to have speed and raw image processing improvements as well as other improvements.
See the link for more info.

Now that I have had more time to spend with it, I am re-energized about using it as a tool.
I’m a hands-on type of person so I prefer to try out an application before I read the documentation. I believe that experiencing what features you don’t know how to use in the application makes you focus more on these areas when reading the documentation. This applies to tutorials as well. Unfortunately, when I first started using Aperture I ran into some issues right away that were quite frustrating. In fact, they made me question whether Aperture was going to be a usable tool for me. However, I continued working with it to give it a fair shake (and due to it’s cost!).

After working with it for a little while I got to the point where it was time for me to read some documentation. In particular I watched the tutorial DVD that came with Aperture all the way through. The tutorial showed off several functions which I had not discovered in my testing that relieved some of my greatest frustrations.

For instance, in the default settings, Aperture doesn’t let you perform image operations like rotation on multiple images at the same time. The operation only affects the “primary select” instead of all the images that are selected. However, there is a mode change “Toggle Primary Only” that you can use that changes the behavior so that you can perform operations on multiple images. (‘S’ is the shortcut for this btw)

So I highly recommend watching the tutorial. It was quite a good overview of Aperture.

But what about the bug that I talked about in my previous Aperture post?
Well, my friend Benjamin Yu figured out a work around for it.
He suggested that the problem might be that I was exporting into a directory that already had a file the same name as one of the files being exported. At first I considered that unlikely because I had created new directories specifically to export into.
However, when I thought back to what I had done during my tests I realized that a few times I had first accidently had a few files selected when I selected to export masters. Then when I realized my mistake I had selected all files and reexported to the same location.

I ran a quick test and indeed, if you export to a directory that already has files with the same name you get no warning and the strange naming results. Rather than using a name similar to the master file name it appears to increase the number in the filename which causes it to have the name as another master file being exported. This causes the results where several of the exported files have incorrect filenames and there are additional files.
So as long as you are careful to make sure that you don’t export to a directory that already has a file with the same name you should be able to avoid this particular bug.

I still haven’t had an opportunity to try out everything that Aperture offers but am feeling more comfortable about using Aperture as a major part of my photography work flow.

I haven’t had the opportunity to play around with it a lot yet, but already have a show stopper.
Aperture has a function that exports the master raw files from a library.
This is good.

I figured I could use it to replicate my current digital photo workflow while getting used to Aperture. So, I imported a photoshoot into Aperture. Then I rotated/white balanced/etc. the photos. As a first test I thought I would check to make sure the “masters” that Aperture exported were in fact the same as the files I had imported.

Imagine my surprise when Aperture exported one more photo then I had imported.
I thought WOW! This might be a break through in photography. You put 10 pictures in and get 11 out. Here’s hoping the extra photo is a good shot.

Alas, it was merely a duplicated copy of one of the other photos. Furthermore, when I did a diff on the exported raw files versus the imported raw files, some of them didn’t match. On further inspection it turned out they weren’t the same photo.

I had selected for Aperture to use the filename from the master files when exporting.
So instead of exporting all of the files using, well, you know, the original filename, like you would expect, for a random subset of the photos it had exported DSC_4157.nef as DSC_4151.nef and DSC_4151.nef as a different number, etc.

So what do we have? A program that I can’t even get my original raw files out of. Do you think I’m going to trust that? Uhh… NO

And in case you were wondering, this was with 1.01.

Another kinda amusing bug. I was starting up Aperture and while it was still starting I switched over to Safari to write this post. When Aperture finished loading, for some reason it forgot to draw the tools or the photo tray.

I want to like Aperture. I really do.

I wonder if there is a place to log bugs against it.

At first I thought it was an attempt to bump up some big corporation’s movie status in search engines. However, after looking at it more closely I don’t believe that is the case. It appears that the attempt is to bump up the rating of a film ranking site. They include the links to these big corporation films, which I assume is to make my site rank higher in movie related searches, and then include a link to their site. A seperate one seems to be using the same technique to try to bump up some indie type films.

Spam. The plague of the information age.