Tag Archives: Apple

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Duplex is Good, But Sometimes It Ain’t

With Charter starting to do some network upgrades around town (for their home users; not sure if I’ll get any boost out of it yet), I decided to see how my line speed was doing. I check it occasionally, but it’s been a while. Ya know, if it’s working, don’t bother it.

When I ran the speed test (from Speakeasy), I noticed that my downlink speed was about half what it should’ve been, which wasn’t what I expected. Charter’s gotten very active on Twitter lately, so I popped a tweet to Eric (@Umatter2Charter), who was quick to ask for some details. This was way before he gets in, but I check Twitter via my iPhone pretty frequently, so I saw his response later in the morning. He though that I’d need to be home to help troubleshoot, so I figured I’d pop another tweet his way once I got home… assuming there was still a problem.

I got home, found there was still a problem, and tweeted Eric about it…. and that’s when I thought to try the test from a different machine on the network. Sure ’nuff, the other machine was just fine. I was about to send Charter on a wild goose chase for something that was on my end. Not good. I tweeted Eric, and got him off the hook just in the nick of time before he called out the dogs. 🙂

As it ends up, my MacPro was sitting at an MTU of 1500, which is not the way it should’ve been set — everything in the house is using jumbo packets instead. Dunno how it got changed, but that wasn’t the culprit. It was my duplexing settings. Again, for some reason unknown to me, the MacPro was sitting at “full-duplex, flow control” instead of “full-duplex”, and through the arcanity of ethernet protocol compliance, that was slowing down my connection as the MacPro saw it. Once the settings were what I would’ve expected, all was well.

I sure wish I knew how things got ugly, but I’m just glad to get ’em fixed!

Apple Existence

This is the iLife!

I came home today to find that iLife ’09 was waiting for me in my mailbox. This little box started out 250 miles to my south, traveled 475 to the northeast of its starting point, and then another 375 to the west of its first landing point, to finally arrive in my mailbox a week to the day after I ordered it. What a strange trip it seems to have been.

So, how is it? Well, I don’t know yet. I just got home and got it installed — installation takes a little while BTW — and haven’t yet fired it up. The impressive thing so far is seeing that iLife is supported on G4’s… that’s some old, old iron.

Stay tuned for more!

Apple Existence

Still Waiting

So, early in January, Apple announced the new version of their personal software, iLife ’09. They said the release would be sometime in January. Sure ’nuff, last Tuesday, folks starting getting shipping notices. On Tuesday, I decided to order mine too. I picked ground shipping, which I thought woulda been okay. On Wednesday, Apple dropped me an e-mail saying iLife has shipped. However, at that point the story gets a little glacial….

shippinghistory

Kinda looks like the combination of DHL and the USPS have turned this into a Pony Express event of some sort. And now, with a predicted delivery date of Thursday the 5th, I’m questioning whether the higher cost for faster shipping woulda made more sense. Or, I guess I coulda driven through the snow and ice to the Apple Store. I’m sure I woulda been back here by now! 🙂

Apple Existence

It’s Not the End of the World, But We Can See It From Here

With the hoopla that is MacWorld going on last week, there was a note from Uncle Steve, talking to why he was away from MacWorld — an easy-to-treat hormone imbalance. Today, the other shoe fell, and it appears that things may have been something more serious.

Man, this really sucks. Not just for the brand, or the markets, or the company, but for the man himself. Regardless of what you think of Apple gear and fanboys, Jobs has led a brilliant campaign upon his rejoining Apple, and with that, his folks have designed some beautiful gear that works very well, and has re-shaped two industries — the home computer market, and the music distribution and listening market. If indeed this is something serious, then we stand to lose someone that I see as a visionary.

Yep, I’m a fanboy — not because it’s Apple, but because Apple makes really good stuff. I have the same view of Jeep, and have had with Icom, Garmin, Bose, Canon and other brands over the years. Companies like those make great gear that does what I need to do without a whole lot of “happy accidents” that I have to work through. That kind of stability has allowed me to explore, and not worry about whether the products I was relying on would work well or not.

My best wishes are with you Uncle Steve — I hope all goes well with the recovery, and I look forward to your hand on the rudder come summer.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iPhone Update

After reading sooooo many things indicating that I’d have to completely reset/reload my iPhone, I was building myself up for an evening’s worth of working on my iPhone. Until…

I found a comment to a blog post that pointed to a piece of code called DiskAid. This little piece of code lets you explore the filesystem on the iPhone (or iPod), and from there, I was able to resolve my issue without a long, tedious battle waged between iTunes and my iPhone.

So what did I do?

Well, I went into the file system, and deleted all the music subfolders in the /iTunes Control Folder/Music. Once I did that, I hard reset the iPhone, and then fired up the little dude, synced (syanc? syunc?) the iPhone, and suddenly, I had music, and a reasonable amount of “Other” space taken up on my iPhone (about 300MB).

I feel like I snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

iPhone Space, The “Other” Frontier

Last night, I dropped my iPhone and iPod Touch into their little cradles… and began my descent through various layers of USB-based hell. This morning, I sat at my little workstation, getting my news and feeds to start my day, and found error messages on my screen indicating that my iPhone couldn’t be found by iTunes, and that my Wacom tablet was not alive.

Best as I can figure, the USB hub dropped it’s communication, which confused my tablet, and may have interrupted the sync process to my iPhone. Apparently that had caused everything that was once called “music” ok the device to now be called “other”… making that space untouchable and unmanageable. From what I’ve been able to gather from Da Goog, it appears that a full restore is in my future tonight.

Blecch!

Apple Existence

What Was Missing

With all the dust having settled from yesterday’s Macworld keynote, folks are starting to look back, and see what was missing. Here’s my list.

  • New iMac — There were rumors all over the place about new iMacs, perhaps with screens as big as 28″.
  • New MacMini — This was the rumor that seemed to be a sure thing, but like the iMac, was a no-show.
  • Snow Leopard — This version of the OS has been rumored to be just over the next hill for months. I can’t believe that didn’t show up at Macworld. With the new bundle of iLife ’09, iWork ’09 and Leopard (10.5), I suspect Snow Leopard (10.6) is a ways off.
  • 32GB iPhone — This wasn’t a lock, but it sure had been rumored a lot.
  • iPhone Nano — This little device really seemed to be another sure thing for announcement, but also was a no show.
  • New MacPros — This was an outside shot, at best. I figured this might happen to placate folks (like me) that wanted a path to use the spiffy new 24″ LED monitor with the high end workstation hardware, with the hopes that some fallout would enable my not-so-old MacPro to run against the new screen.

I’m sure there were many other missing devices and code from Macworld’s announcements, but these were the ones that seemed glaring in their omission to me.

Apple Existence

Apple’s Last Hurrah

Apple gave its last keynote at Macworld today. There’s been a lot of buzz about the fact that Apple was going to pull out of Macworld, and even more buzz about the fact that Uncle Steve wasn’t going to deliver the swan song. However, at the end of the day, Apple went on stage today, and spilled the new goods. My opinion?

Meh.

Three big things were presented, plus “one more thing.” Updates to software were two of those — iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 — along with a new 17″ MacBook Pro and the announcement of the death of DRM in the iTunes Music Store.

The software updates to iWork didn’t grab me. However, the updates to iPhoto (part of iLife ’09) really impressed me. Apple has introduced face recognition in images — a kind of holy grail for archivists, I think — that will allow iPhoto to find all photos with a specific person’s face in them… within reason. If someone’s face is distorted — being kissed on both cheeks, for example — then it appears it may not work as well. But gosh, the number of images it will work on is going to be such a wonderful thing! There’s also support for geotagging, Google Maps, and all kinds of things that will make the iPhoto experience that much better.

For me, this brings a pretty good quandry to the surface. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom as my DAM tool. However, it doesn’t have some of these nice bells and whistles promised in iPhoto. iPhoto couldn’t handle big image catalogs like mine, although I hear it manages large catalogs much better nowadays. LR also does a great job of non-destructive editing, and iPhoto seems to touch on that a bit, but I’m not clear on just how well that’s handled. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to playing with iPhoto later this month when it’s released.

On the hardware front, I fully expected to exhale a giant “D’oh” after the MacBook Pro announcements. However, the only thing announced was the obviously-needing-to-be-updated 17″ MBP, and frankly, for about $300 more than my 15″ MBP, you don’t really get that much. Bigger screen, sure, but the rest of the things that make the machine work bigger/better/faster/more just don’t seem to add up to the difference in price… and the extra pound of weight to carry around. So yeah, the new machine is an incremental improvement over my 15″ MBP, but it really does seem to be just a tiny evolutionary wiggle.

As for the DRM free iTMS… well, it’s about time. I hate that it’s 30¢ per track to “upgrade” existing purchases to DRM-free formats, but I think it’s gonna be well worth it. Higher sample rates and more freedom to use tunes I’ve purchased on gear I own will make this a worthwhile uptick. Frankly, I’ve got less than 200 tracks that I’ve purchased through iTMS — I’ve always just bought the CDs and pulled them into iTunes. With the new future of iTMS though, I may be a bit more inclined to purchase full albums digitally. It does seem as though the record companies have finally come to terms with electronic distribution, and I’m pleased that I’ll be able to take advantage of it with iTMS.

So, in general, meh. But there were some jewels today in iPhoto and iTunes that will bear some watching.

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

And Then There Were Four

Last night, the AppleStork came, and dropped off the latest addition to the Deauxmayne… a new 8GB iPhone. As Becky has pointed out, I now have one of each current iPod model. That wasn’t a plan, but it is interesting that it has happened.

I like the device — of course, it’s not that far different than the iPod Touch. It’s a little narrower and thicker, and has a more substantial feel in your hand than does the Touch. One funny I noticed is that the touchscreen “feels” different. I would’ve assumed the same glass was on both, but somehow, the glass on the Touch feels slicker. When I first drug my finger across the iPhone screen, I thought it was “sticky” by comparison to the Touch’s screen. Weird, huh?

The phone seems to work pretty well as compared to my HTC Mogul. For me though, the impressive piece is the internet access. It is so much nicer than the experience on Windows Mobile 6 on the Mogul. That’s not HTC’s fault; that’s Microsoft’s. What an amazing difference working through Safari instead of IE! And since I’m all Apple at home, the integration with my Macs is sweet, and the interface concepts are familiar.

Phydeaux is a happy camper!

Apple Existence, Geek-Speak

Touch-y Quirks

I’ve been fighting a weird little problem with my iPod Touch. I’ve noticed that some Genius-generated playlists have a quirk about them that prevented the correct artist and album cover to be displayed in coverflow for some tracks. Tip the thing over to the track view, and presto, chango, suddenly the art is right, as is the artist.

After doing a bunch of searching, I didn’t find anything that matched my symptoms. And then I noticed something… all the tracks involved in this had the same album title: Greatest Hits. Having all those tracks labelled like that created a giant album on the Touch that had myriad artist’s GH tracks all attached to the same album, and that seems to have been the root cause of the problem.

Now, I’ve added something to the album title for my GH discs so they will now be distinct from each other, and that appears to have solved the problem. Weird, weird, weird….