Shirt Pocket Watch

Many of you probably know that, for some reason, iSight cameras can get into a weird state where they start causing serious errors with FireWire drives.

The symptoms usually include a bunch of I/O errors while copying to a FireWire drive: failed copies, flaky behavior, crashes. All of this goes away if you power off, disconnect the iSight, wait a while and power back up.

Sometimes, the iSight stops working with iChat (it says the camera's in use when it's not, or the light comes on, but you don't get any picture), and in it was in that second state today when I had a kernel panic.

No data was lost, I'm happy to say, but I decided that I've had enough of this. Since 10.4.9 supports USB cameras, I've switched to a Logitech QuickCam Ultra Vision. (All they need to do is add Super Deluxe Extreme Edition to the end to make it really cool!)

It's not as elegant as the original iSight (it's fixed focus, horizontal format, a bit gaudy), but it's got a nice wide angle lens, built in microphone, works with any monitor, and seems reliable. Plug the thing in, and it works.

Given that you can't buy "real" iSights any more, and based on direct experience, I give it a thumbs-up.

Sorry, iSight. I'll miss you!

It's really easy to quickly outgrow your internal drive if you've got a substantial iTunes library. And, with all that metadata involved, the last thing you want to do is lose your ratings, comments, whatever.

Don't despair. It's actually really easy to move your iTunes library with iTunes itself. That's right: no Finder, no SuperDuper!, no nothing. And iTunes takes care of all the details!

Here's how:

1. Make sure the drive you want to put the library on is connected. The drive can be a network volume, local volumes, whatever -- just make sure it's mounted and ready to go.

2. Open iTunes and choose iTunes > Preferences. In the Advanced tab, choose the new location for the library.

At this point, you could stop, and all future music/movies/whatever you add to iTunes will be stored in the new location: in essence, your library will be on more then one drive, and you can repeat the above as the new location fills as well.

But, if you want to move your existing music and videos into the new location:

3. Choose Advanced > Consolidate Library. iTunes will copy all of the music from all the various previous locations into the new library location you selected above.

When it's done, make sure you're happy with what you've got. You can then delete the old iTunes Music folder in ~/Music/iTunes. But don't delete the iTunes Library or itunes Music Library.xml files: those must remain where they are.

When the new Airport Extreme Base Station came out, I was happy to see that it had some support for attached USB drives. It's a reasonable (though not perfect) way to share data in a home/SOHO situation, and I figured people would be using it to back up with SuperDuper! So -- to help out...

General Comments

A few things to point out right off the bat:

• As you've likely seen elsewhere, the Airport Disks are not fast. Don't expect blazing speeds: wired, I've seen a maximum of about 1.5MB/s.

• The AEBS gets very, very cranky if you get to a disk full situation. I've seen it crash more than once. Don't do that.

• Remember that HFS+ drives are made available through AFP, and FAT32 through SMB.

  Don't format any drives you're going to use with SuperDuper! as FAT32: use HFS+ (and partition properly for the Mac processor type you're using -- GUID for Intel, Apple Partition Map for Power PC).

• Make sure to connect a power supply to the drive.

• As general advice, please don't cheap out when you get an external drive. Really. Get one with a real Oxford chipset, USB/FireWire if possible in case you want to attach it directly to your Mac.

• Don't expect miracles. This is an inexpensive solution, and it behaves like one. If you want a real NAS, I suggest an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+: it's faster, redundant, recoverable. I'll have another post about the ReadyNAS soon.

• Remember, this is a first generation ("Rev A") product. It's likely to go through teething pains. Don't rely on them as your only backup!

Using Airport Disks with SuperDuper!

You'll note that your Airport Disks don't show up in the SuperDuper! pop-ups. This is by design: we can't currently copy directly to or from a network volume due to authentication/permission/metadata issues.

Instead, you'll follow the steps in Backing up over a network in the SuperDuper! User's Guide (Help > User's Guide), and back up to a read/write sparse image stored on the Airport Disk.

We often get asked why SuperDuper! can't back up directly to a network volume. What most people don't realize is that, for security reasons, you can't directly authenticate as "root" over a network, and that means it's not possible to store files with system ownership on a network drive.

An image, on the other hand, acts as a "local drive", and can be authenticated against, even though it's stored remotely. This ensures that your files are backed up with full fidelity, including proper ownership and permissions. And since it's formatted as HFS+, it avoids various situations that can ensue trying to emulate HFS+ semantics and metadata storage on a non-HFS+ drive, while still storing in a native, non-proprietary, Mac-native format.

I'd suggest doing your first full backup directly to the USB drive, rather than over the network. This'll be a lot faster. You can then connect the drive to the base station, and re-select the image using the "Disk Image..." choice in SuperDuper!'s destination drive pop-up. (Note that although the image will be grey, you can still pick it, and ignore the "overwrite" warning. Yes, I know that UI sucks.)

That should do it: enjoy the base station!

Some time ago, I switched from MarsEdit to ecto. Mostly, I did this because I liked writing posts with "real" formatting -- that is, using the RTF editing view that ecto offered.

At the time, I was only allowing myself 15 minutes per post, and the HTML I was using in MarsEdit simply got in the way of quickly reading the post for content. Too much translation, the Preview didn't really do it for me... and it didn't look like Brent was going to find much time to work on the program (understandable, given his success with NetNewsWire).

Given that set of issues, I switched. Not all upside (the HTML generated by the RTF translator was rather sub-optimal), but overall it worked for me.

With Daniel Jalkut's recent acquisition of MarsEdit (congratulations, Daniel!), and his flurry of activity improving the core and fixing bugs, I've decided to give it another shot. And to get around the readability problem, I'm giving Markdown a try.

I don't know why I didn't use Markdown before -- probably, I didn't want to learn yet another thing. Maybe I just wasn't aware of it. But I'm glad I've finally found it and taken the time to figure it out. Markdown's pretty easy: natural to read and write once you grasp the basics. JG and Aaron Swartz did a good job with the syntax: it's regular, logical, functional, readable.

And it's supported by Expression Engine, too.

So, three posts later, I'm sticking with it. Hopefully with these few changes I'll be able to find a bit more time to blog!

It wasn't that long ago that HP had the absolute worst OSX drivers of any major peripheral developer. Their scanners barely worked, their printers sort of worked, the software they loaded was pretty shamefully buggy, flaky... they just sucked.

So, imagine my surprise when -- after a recent Mac purchase at the Apple Store -- I decided to get a "free" HP C6180 all-in-one printer and... hey! It's been de-suckified!

The thing is well designed, has good drivers, built-in networking, even scans and faxes over the network -- pushing or pulling to multiple "associated" Macs. It's not perfect but what the hell? It's like someone is writing these drivers who actually uses a Mac!

When did that happen? Doesn't HP know they're supposed to have crappy Mac products?

And after that good experience, and reading a number of great reviews, I grabbed an HP B9180 Photosmart Pro Printer, too. Again, a great printer, with good drivers, built-in networking, relatively frugal with inks, good paper handling: and it generates great prints.

This is HP -- "we generate huge dots with expensive ink and our photos look like crap" HP. And -- not.

Wow. I don't know what's going on at HP, but they should definitely keep it up.

A few weeks ago, we took Taiko in to get his hips x-rayed to ensure there aren’t any problems to look forward to, and for a small adjustment—a necessary nip-and-tuck.

The big guy pulled through just fine. When I went to pick him up, our Dr. Davis and I looked over his rather excellent x-rays.

“Hey these are really great hips, Dave. Taiko’s a great Berner. You should breed him!”

Bob took a perfectly timed beat.

“Oops!”

What a joker.

You know, it’s pretty rare that I post up here about netTunes, mostly because… well… it just works, and there’s not much to say other than “Whoa! Cool!"… which gets a bit boring.

But, every so often I’ll get a question about how it’s possible to access commands that aren’t available in the main window—for example, Store > Check for Purchases...

So, from the department of obscure features, let’s get this done!

Normally, you’d access things like this with an onscreen control or keyboard shortcut. For example, to access iTunes’ Preferences, you can press Cmd+y (an alternate for Cmd+,) and it’ll come right up. And you can add a playlist with the + button in the main window. But Check for Purchases doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut or button, and so it’s not available in netTunes.

But there’s hope! In Tiger, you can add your own keyboard shortcuts using the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane. Open that up, switch to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab and click the + button. Set the Application pop-up to iTunes, then enter the full, properly capitalized text of the menu item (in this case, Check for Purchases..., including the ...). Choose a shortcut key (like Cmd+Opt+C).

Save, then quit and restart iTunes and poof! You can now Check for Purchases in netTunes on the client!

Fog Creek software finally released an Intel-compatible version of FogBUGZ so—as of about 1pm today—we’ve had another Moving Day: this time from our “old” 2GHz G5 to a 1.83GHz Mac mini.

And it’s kicking the G5’s ass.

It’s really weird when a not-very-old computer is outperformed by one that can fit in its CD-ROM bay, but there you have it.

Hopefully, no one will notice any differences—except, perhaps, that everything’s a little bit faster. Enjoy!

Hopefully no one out there noticed, but—for the first time in three years—Zabeth and I managed to get away for a two week vacation at Red Mountain (in Rossland, BC).

It’s not too bad a trip, about three hours north of Spokane, WA, a straight shot after a (normally) easy flight or two. A few screw-ups this time meant various additional hops, but in the end we made it.

It’s my very favorite place to ski. It’s kind of an “old fashioned” ski hill, with four “low speed” chairs, a T-Bar and a (new) “magic carpet” lift. The base lodge is quite basic, with lockers in the bottom level, a cafeteria on the 2nd and a bar on the 3rd. Up in the “Paradise” area, there’s another small lodge/warming hut/eatery… and that’s pretty much it.

And, honestly, all that works great. The food’s good, the people are great. But what Red’s about is the skiing.

The skiing is awesome.

Red had a ton of early snow—about nine feet—and though we didn’t get much fresh snow in the two weeks the mountain was in fine form. The first few days were almost spring-like conditions on the front face, soft even early in the day. Red’s a deceptive mountain, though, where you can ski 360 degrees around the various peaks, with a ton of off-piste skiing (some of which can get quite extreme). And the backsides, even during the sunny days, stayed shaded, the snow light.

Which was a good thing, because once the temperatures dropped, the front firmed up, which made the less groomed, exposed trails much less enjoyable early in the day. So, after a few groomers, we typically headed to the various back glades, bowls and other pitches, finishing up in the sun at the end of the day.

We stayed at Greene’s Family Guest House, a great little place in Rossland run by Rick and Sue Greene (thanks for the hospitality, Rick & Sue). It’s a few minutes’ drive to Red itself, and—fortunate for me—they’ve recently installed a wireless network. So, via the Miracle of the Tubes, work from 7-9am, skiing from 9-3, work from 3-7, dinner, and work until bed (usually while we caught up with episodes of Lost we’d missed, thanks to an iPod full of episodes plugged into the TV).

Seamless, I hope, for the SuperDuper! users who needed help.

It was a great time, and quite relaxing despite having full work days every day, and I feel fortunate to have a job that lets me do what I need to do even when far from home.

My parents were also able to take Taiko for the time, and I hope he was well behaved while there. They seem to have done really well, and Z and I are really grateful that they could watch him. (Sorry that he’s still jumping!)

Got back late Friday (during a snowstorm, of course), and picked up Taiko on Saturday, who was happy to see us and is warming my feet as I type. The mail revealed that Zabeth has passed the Veterinary Boards, which is terrific news too (not that I had any doubt), and she heads back into rotations early tomorrow morning.

And so, it’s back to the grind—refreshed.

It’s hard to believe another year’s gone by, but dates rarely lie, and there it is - the 31st, soon to flip.

Rather than turn inward and reflect on events here, I’d like to turn outward and thank each and every reader; all those who took the time to send me mail - those who needed support, needed to vent, to compliment or complain; the kind people who provided comfort as we lost our dog Ketzl and who cheered the arrival of Taiko; the editors at Macworld who honored us again; the users who honor us every time they use or recommend a Shirt Pocket product; all friends, old and new.

To all of you: thank you, and a very Happy New Year to you and yours.