SansPoint

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders is asking his readers to suggest ways to sync their Macs. I’m anxious to see what wins as the best solution. I’ve tried .Mac and MySync (now SyncTogether) with mixed, often poor results. MySync utterly failed on me while trying to sync Yojimbo, and I suspect the only way to fix it is to reinstall my OS on the desktop, which I’m less than keen to do. .Mac is overpriced, klunky, slow, and just plain sucks. If it were free, I’d use it with gritted teeth, but as it stands now, .Mac is a waste of $100 a year.

Besides, neither of these synchronize preferences^[1], or work when there’s no internet connection. Merlin himself is pimping ChronoSync, and I’m willing to give that a try. It would certainly save me from having to futz with thumbdrives and other nonsense to keep things moving from Mac to Mac.

Of course, the more I think about it, the more I think I should just sell my mini and iBook, get a damn MacBook Pro^[2] with a huge-ass external drive. One computer, at home and on the go, and no worries about synchronization. We’ll see what happens.

1. This is less of an issue for me, as it’s not a great chore just to tweak stuff on my iBook to work as expected. If you have more than two Macs, though, I could see the point ↩
2. or, perhaps, a BlackBook ↩

Sorry for the lack of updates. Real life, college, and various other things have interfered. Consider this post a resumption of form.

One thing I love about Apple is their attention to all the little details of the UI experience. No other company or open-source project has been able to match Apple’s quality control over interfaces. That is why I am so upset.

See, the headphone jack on my 5th Generation iPod video broke. I had to get a new one or learn to solder. I opted to get a new iPod classic, and I fell in love with it immediately. It’s everything my old iPod was and more. The new interface is quite nice, save for one thing…

See that? That is an errant apostrophe. It’s unacceptable, it’s incorrect, it should not be there. Apple, shame on you.

An apostrophe is never, ever used to make a word plural, nor abbreviations, not even when the word ends in a vowel. An apostrophe is used to indicate a multiple of a letter (e.g. “The word letter has two t’s.”). That’s the beginning and end of the apostrophe’s role as plural.

The saddest, most pathetic part of this, is that the previous iPod iterations have all done this right. The menu option was “To-Dos,” and that is the way it should have stayed.

Maybe it’ll be fixed in the next update. I can only hope. Apostrophe abuse must be stopped.

A while back, I ran OnyX to clean up my desktop a bit, and got a horrifying disc error dialog. Though I have not experienced any problems, I was worried enough to get my hands on Diskwarrior, and ran it. It fixed some problems, and though I’ve yet to run OnyX again (that’ll be this weekend), it got me worried about losing all my precious data. This includes a hypermassive music collection, documents of my writing, homework, and other personal projects, and other fun things.

I figured I had one major option: shell out more money I don’t have for a second external hard drive.^[1] Hearing the horror stories of not having stuff backed up on two consecutive episodes of The Merlin Show, I realized I ought to do SOMETHING.

Turns out, Amazon offers a web-based backup service, that can hold any amount you need, and charges $.15 per gigabyte each month for storage and $.20 a month afterwards. Compared to an external backup drive, that’s cheap, and I can access it from almost anywhere with Internet access. I can backup both my mini and my iBook, and not break the bank.

So, I’m now in the process of uploading my data. It’s going to be a while, but once it’s done, I’ll feel a lot safer.

UPDATE: Since it would take 101 days at my current upload speed to put my music collection up on S3, I decided to skip that. At least my docs are safe now. I’ll have to get an external HD after all, but this is a good temporary solution.

1. I’d make sure to avoid LaCie. Though my mini Companion has served me well as a primary boot drive, I’ve heard enough horror stories to make me want to avoid trying again. It also runs kinda hot. ↩

Okay, a couple days ago, I joined Twitter, being part of the massive throng which has amassed on the site in the past month. Well, the novelty has yet to wear off, but I’m wondering just how long it will last. It reminds me of a little phenomenon during the early days of weblogging, just before it really took off: the E/N site. Short for “Everything/Nothing”, the stereotypical E/N site consisted of several short posts a day of the same content level as Twitter - whatever the hell that person was doing/thinking at the time.^[1]

Twitter posts are about the same: one sentence, usually short, simple, and generally of no real interest except for voyeurism. It’s interesting to know that Lore Sjöberg is taking a nap, but do I really need notification of that sent as a text message to my cell phone? Does he need me to tell him I just got home from work? Do any of my readers need to know, either? In case you do, I’ve even added a Twitter widget to the sidebar.

Overload is becoming a problem, I only have 12 people on my Twitter friends list, and I had to turn off cell phone notifications after just a couple hours. Just the volume from those 12 people was enough to drive me nuts. Some early adopters are becoming completely overwhelmed. I’m sure there’s more value to Twitter than, say, MySpace^[2], especially if you have local friends and need to keep track of what’s happening in a social context. Since I can count the friends I have in meatspace that I would be likely to do things with, and are in close enough geographical proximity, on one hand, Twitter is going to have to remain a fun little voyeuristic distraction. As long as I’m not posting about what the hell I’m watching on TV or when I go to the bathroom, it should be okay.

1. This site was almost an E/N site for a while. What kept it from falling into the E/N trap were long posts, and my inability to even bother updating daily. ↩
2. I’m still ashamed to have a MySpace. I don’t think I’ll ever accept it. ↩

When last we left my friend’s ancient iMac, it had OS 9, but was still not much more than a glorified paperweight. This past Friday, we finished the job. First, the 128 MB RAM module was pulled from the broken iMac, as well as its bottom plastic plate to replace the broken one on the new machine. Then, we installed the RAM into the new iMac, for a total of 192 MB, more than enough for Panther. Next, I installed the iMac firmware update, which was a painless procedure. Finally, we were ready to install OS X…

…And, it went off without any major hitches. We got his machine online, and began to install the copious amount of software updates that it needed: 10.3.9 update, security update, Daylight Savings Time update, iTunes update, Safari update, etc. It took longer to update the damn thing than it did to install OS X.^[1] We had enough time to go back out into the elements for dinner at Wendy’s, and got back to find it still installing updates.

Now, though, my friend is finally online and able to read the harrowing struggle of getting his ancient machine functioning with the world. Of course, the question now remains about what to do with the busted 500Mhz iMac DV sitting in the corner of my room in a box, and with no bottom plastic base.

1. Seriously. OS X installed in about 30 minutes from startup to welcome screen. ↩