Disclaimer - I have nobody to blame but myself for this, and I am fully aware of that fact.

On Thursday, our landlord had an electrician come into our unit to do some work. He (the landlord) warned us several different times in advance that this was occurring, and even pointed out that since the power was probably going to be cut, we should make sure to save files on our computers, etc. Being the professional nerdbag that I am, I shrugged it off with a "sure, sure, of course, thanks for pointing that out, etc."

Well, on Thursday morning, on the way to a conference, I realized I had neglected to shut my Mac down before leaving. "Oh well," I thought. "It's survived power failures before, and I don't have anything open that I am worried about."

Sure enough, I get home that night, and when I boot up my Mac, it powers up from the backup install - my main system drive is offline. I do some investigating, and discover that one of my external FW hard drives is DOA - won't spin up.

This is the hard drive that has two partitions - one that is my main OS X system drive, and the other is my main data drive.

I've just lost my OS, applications, and my iTunes, iPhoto, and all my documents.

Well, luckily for me, I recently upgraded to Leopard, which includes a nifty little auto-backup thinger called Time Machine. So all of that stuff was totally backed up to an additional external HDD (which, fortunately, survived). The internal HD on my Mac (which I was using for a backup OS because I thought that since the external FW hard drive was 7200 instead of 5400 I'd get better performance, etc, etc) would be able to get "restored" to from the backup of my DOA OS partition, and I could restore the data partition to another extra external HD (which I had been using for iterative backups before Time Machine existed, so I didn't need it for that anymore).

Last night I fired up the Leopard DVD, and instead of running the install, I just picked "restore from Time Machine" or something like that. It took a little convincing to get it to see the internal HD, but once I did, it took about an hour to copy all the data, and then voila! I was back in business.

Well, with the system part. The data partition still need restoring.

The first thing I did was immediately turn OFF Time Machine backups - I had read that after a restore, Time Machine was not good about knowing what it had backed up BEFORE. I was able to find my old Data partition in Time Machine, and tried to restore every folder on it to my newly created Data partition.

That did not work well.

I found I had to do one folder at a time (which was no big deal, since there were only about 7 folders at the root of /Data, and some of the smaller ones I could do at the same time). The biggest problem I had was with iPhoto. I store my iPhoto library on the data partition and not in my Home directory. And somewhere along the line I had upgraded my iPhoto. When I picked just the iPhoto from /Data, it did not restore very well. But if I browsed back in Time Machine to before the upgrade, restored the iPhoto Library folder, and then restored the current iPhoto Library over that, everything worked swimmingly.

One thing that I am kicking myself for - I had my Aperture library excluded from the TM backup (because it's notoriously a bad TM-citizen) figuring "well heck, I back up the Aperture library to a vault on a different disk".

Guess what? I haven't backed up my Aperture library (since it's a manual process) since Dec 29, 2007. Oh well. Luckily I have anything important already on Flickr. I hope.

Tags: mac, osx, tech

So I have information all over the place, and I really want to keep it in a smart way.

For background, here's how I do things right now:

I use Gmail exclusively. All of my email addresses go to Gmail. I use the web client to read/send email. I'd like to use Mail.app for email management when I'm actually on my Mac, and use the web interface at other times. Problem is, Gmail is POP, but not IMAP, so my Mail.app mailbox and my gmail boxes will get out of sync. Plus, I have a bunch of filters in my Gmail that send messages to labels and then auto-archives them, so those messages won't get popped down.

Contacts are a mess - I use Plaxo to keep everything updated, which is super cool. The only problem is it doesn't interface with ANYTHING else that I use. I also have contacts in Gmail (necessary for email composing) and Address Book on my Mac (necessary for Adium, which I use for IM).

What I think I would like to do, ideally, is figure out a way to keep Address Book, Gmail contacts, and Plaxo in sync. I think the Mail/Gmail problem is solveable just by changing some of my filters (getting rid of the "Archive" option, but keep slapping the filters on). I don't know what to do about the contacts though.

What are you guys doing for contact/email management?

Tags: lazyweb, mac, tech

mteson sent me this link.

It's pretty awesome.

Mac OS X 10.9 "Liger"

Tags: funny, mac

mteson sent me this a while ago, but I lost the link. Thanks to /., I have found it again. Whew!

The Apple Product Cycle

Tags: funny, mac

Don't get me wrong. I am so into Apple that it hurts, and I love the Mac, especially OS X.

But some of these fanboys suck down the Cupertino Kool-Aid so thoroughly that I get a contact Reality Distortion Field just by sharing TCP packets with them.

At the end of the day, it's a fucking computer. It's not a way of life. It's not a religion. And unless you're trying to fuck swingfeline, using a Mac isn't going to help your sex life. And even then, you'd better be a thin hipster guy with glasses, or even a prototype G5 Powerbook won't get you to second base.

About the only good thing about the Mac is that it doesn't run Windows. Plus, it's pretty. Plus, it's the best thing ever on the entire planet. Plus, Steve Jobs sweats much less profusely than Steve Ballmer.

Tags: mac, rants

I always want to remove all the Apple and Mac LJ communities from my friends list for the first few days after a Jobs keynote. Because it's post after post after post about the same info we ALL read already on /., MacNN, etc etc.

Then the complaints start coming in.

"I like the Mac Mini, but it won't work with my old ADC monitor. What a ripoff. Apple should have considered their existing customers who have old gear when they were designing a product aimed at switchers!" or "Why couldn't they have put in a super fast top of the line graphics card and a G5 processor? This is such a rip off".

As someone pointed out on Slashdot - first you complain that Macs are too expensive. Then when they finally make a good one (just as powerful as my Powerbook) in a reasonable price range, you bitch about how "underpowered" they are. And you can't even bitch about the one-button mouse anymore - the MM doesn't come with one.

Tags: lj, mac

Final Cut Expres HD video editing suite introduced...adds LiveType for animated tiling. Sountrack for custom music. Seamlessly integrates with iMovie files and Motion. Priced at $299. Available in February. $99 upgrade from Final Cut Express [strangely no audience reaction] [9:44 PT]
mteson express HD *yawn*
mattstratton yeah, that's really gotta be the most useless product ever
mattstratton who needs HD, but doesn't need the other fcp features?
mteson well I've got all these home movies I've shot in HD
mteson you know, really basic stuff I'd love to edit but I just don't have the time.
mattstratton maybe iLife '06 will have iMovie HD
mteson Quicktime HD
mteson you can add it to non video applications
mteson Quicken HD
mteson Microsoft Word HD
mattstratton Maelstrom HD
mattstratton The Sims HD
mattstratton TextEdit HD
mteson Terminal HD
mattstratton Open Firmware HD
iLife '05 features major upgrades for each application. iPhoto features project folders subfolders. Calendar view to search for things by day/month/year. Supports MPEG-4 movies. New iPhoto supports RAW, a feature found in high-end digital cameras. New editing tools, including quick thumbnail view of photos in library. Integrated with Dashboard for quick, easy editing of both JPEG and RAW photos. Jobs offers demo of new iPhoto. Impressive editing tools for rotate/zoom. Can view/organize MPEG movies (from digital cameras, etc.). Dashboard integration instantly offers advanced tools. More advanced slideshows. New Way to make books (soft cover, four different sizes, double the number of pages, ranging $4-$30). Apple will cut price to $0.29 per print (cut in half). [9:58 PT]
mteson ooo. the rotate/zoom tools for iPhoto are "impressive"
mattstratton every time I see "impressive", it makes me think of Mortal Kombat
mteson Mortal Kombat HD
New iMovie. Now edits HD video. Also offers..Magic iMovie, MPEG-4 video, new transition & effects, and more. [9:59 PT]
mteson HA!!!!
mteson IMOVIE HD!!!!!

Tags: mac, tech
Current Mood: geeky

A really interesting read can be found at folklore.org, which is "a web site devoted to collective historical storytelling."

Although right now it's only stories about the development of the original Macintosh, mostly written by Andy Hertzfeld, one of the main authors of the Macintosh system software working on the core operating system and the User Interface toolbox, as well as most of the original desk accessories.

Lots of fun anecdotes about my man Jobs, especially the one that describes Andy's first encounter with the Reality Distortion Field:

"Well, it's Steve. Steve insists that we're shipping in early 1982, and won't accept answers to the contrary. The best way to describe the situation is a term from Star Trek. Steve has a reality distortion field."

"A what?"

"A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules."

Tags: mac, tech

So I just read that you can download iTunes 4.5 now for the Mac. Actually, maybe they have it for Windows too. I'm not sure.

Here's what appears to be the new features in 4.5 (I assume it'll show up in Software Update in the next day or two):

* Some free music downloads from the iTMS

* iMix - I guess this lets you upload your mix cd's track listings to iTMS so other folks can check 'em out.

* Music Video section on iTMS revamped

* Radio Charts on iTMS - pretty neat...I don't know what they use to calculate this, but you can browse to your favorite ClearChannel Whorehouse radio station and see/buy tunes that they play

* "Party Shuffle" - I guess this is just a one-click approach to dynamic playlists...I'm not sure what the difference is between using Party Shuffle and just putting the whole playlist on "shuffle"....but anything with the word "party" in it must be fun, right?

* Jewel case/insert printing for burned CD's

* Lossless encoding - for all of you FLAC lovers

* WMA importing

Enjoy!

Tags: itunes, mac, tech
Current Mood: curious

So I figured out that the reason my Powerbook has been crashing is *not* because it was dropped, but rather, it has a bad memory module.

I purchased a 512 MB module back in October from Accord Memory.

Of course, their website no longer comes up. I bet they are out of business. I just tried emailing them. I hope I can get it replaced.

Check it out for yourself at the iTunes Music Store Franz Ferdinand - Jacqueline

Tags: mac, powerbook

Just reading the manual for DVD Studio Pro 2...and in the chapter about creating subtitles, this is one of the examples:

00:00:12:04 , 00:00:14:12 , Lemurs are the bullies of the wild.
00:00:16:14 , 00:00:19:08 , Here we see them bring down a moose.

For some reason, I found that hysterical.

Incidentally, I don't think any DVD that GTF puts out will have subtitles. They are a royal pain to create. I really wanted to put subtitles on our DVD, and then take the subtitle file and run it through Babelfish to create "other language" tracks...but man, it could take forever.

Tags: mac, tech

OK, so one of the things announced at MacWorld Expo today was Apple's new browser, Safari.

It's in beta, but I loaded it on my OS X machine anyway.

Holy motherfucking shit. This this is FAST. Super fast. Faster than Opera. Faster than most any browser I've used.

I think my Mac may become my surfing machine from now on. Anyone running OS X, I highly recommend you check this shit out.

m.

Tags: mac
Current Mood: impressed

So finally Ellen Feiss has talked to the press (thanks Megan for the scoop).

Click here to read the Ellen Feiss Interview.

It was pretty funny. I also like this Fox Trot comic -

Tags: funny, mac