Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

The New iPods

Apple’s event today was, in short, a snore-a-thon.  Maybe that’s unfair, but if it is, it’s Apple’s own fault.  They set the bar so high for their special events years ago that anything short of ground-breaking new technology is going to be a severe disappointment.  There was nothing at all ground breaking about todays event.  There were, however, a couple interesting things.

The most notable was the surprise everyone experienced when they announced the iPod Nano was receiving a video camera whilst the iPod Touch is not.  There was much speculation that the Touch would be getting the camera, as well as the possibility of it getting GPS capabilities.  It was expected that the Touch would realize its place as the iPhone minus the phone.  Apparently Apple has another direction in mind.  After hearing several tech blogs state that the iPod Touch was a capable portable gaming platform it seems that Apple adopted that mentality.  The touted all the games available for the iPod Touch, and talked about all the developers making their latest and greatest for the iPod Touch.  I also don’t think its unfair to say Apple is worried that the Touch could cannibalize iPhone sales.  There are a lot of people looking for a lot of the features of the iPhone, but not be forced to pay the AT&T tax.  I’ll admit I really like my iPod Touch, and it would be nice to pick up one with more capacity (and in theory a bit better battery life).

There’s a new iTunes in town, and this is perhaps the more interesting of the announcements today.  In particular, to me, the best part is the Home Sharing feature.  This feature allows you to share the music and videos on up to five machines over your home network.  Home Sharing is something that people had been hoping to see in iTunes ever since it debuted.  It removes the hassle of having to have multiple copies of things housed on each computer.  It allows you to not only stream from one machine to another, but also to copy the music and videos between the machines.  I like this feature because it allows me to keep all my media on a desktop machine, but if I wanted to have some movies with me when I traveled I could easily copy them over from the desktops library and then delete them at a later date.  Sure there have always been ways to do this, and most of them aren’t all that complicated.  But they are a bit of a hassle, and what Apple has done is make it as simple as opening up iTunes and dropping and dragging the media you want in to your local library.  So far I’ve only played with the streaming features of both music and TV shows that I had purchased from the iTunes Store.  The streaming worked great – there were no hiccups at all.

Finally, to all those people hoping to see the Beatles come to the iTunes store (yawn), it seems you’ll just have to continue to hope, wonder, and dream along with all those Apple Tablet people who swear its going to be announced at the next big event.

OS X 10.5.8 Update Fouled Up my Time Machine

Last month my laptops hard drive died.  It went from a little wonkiness, to a loud clicking, and then straight to sudden death.  Mostly I was annoyed.  I’m good about backups.  I have a cloned image of my drive.  All my important and irreplaceable documents and pictures also get their own private onsite and offsite backups.  I have also been using Apple’s Time Machine.  While I was annoyed that I would have to replace the MacBook’s hard drive (which, fortunately, is far easier than it was to have to replace the drive in my old iBook), I was eager to see how well Time Machine worked at recovering from backups.  So after I got the new drive installed I booted up from the OS X disc and selected to recover from Time Machine.  It went smoothly, and in about an hour all my data was on the new drive and it booted up and looked and felt like nothing had ever happened.  I was impressed.

Two days later I installed the 10.5.8 update via Software Update.  It appeared that everything went smoothly.  It wasn’t until the next day I realized the little indicator for Time Machine was constantly spinning.  When I checked on its status it seemed to be stuck on “Preparing…”.  Hmmm.  This wasn’t happy behavior.  I fiddled with the settings a bit.  Stopped the backup and started a new one and again it hung on the same thing.  I decided since I had created a new cloned drive image after getting the new drive up to speed I would reformat the drive I used for Time Machine.  I don’t really deal much with incremental file versions so I wasn’t worried about losing months of access to those. (for the record I have an Airport Extreme (pre-dual band versions)with a 500GB USB drive plugged in to it that I back up to via the wireless network).  After reformatting the thing I began starting it up as a new Time Machine drive and once again it stuck on “Preparing…”.  Checking out Console.app showed it was having problems accessing Spotlight related files on the new drive image.  This of course was odd as it was a brand new sparse.image file, but all the same it could neither read/create/nor find whatever it was looking for and was throwing up several errors a minute.  Searching around the web revealed a few other people with similar problems, but no solutions at first.  After awhile some people began posting that they had that issue but let it keep going for a few hours and suddenly the backup kicked in.  The theory being that Spotlight needed time to reindex everything after the 10.5.8 update.   Okay, I could buy this.  So I started up Time Machine and let it go overnight.

Fast forward over 12 hours and the machine was still preparing.  There’s only 40GB’s in use on this drive so I find it hard to believe it was still attempting indexing.  Next I invoked  mdutil -E to the laptops hard drive to force it to index.  Spotlight showed it was indexing, and I clicked on it so I could watch its progress bar.  20 minutes later the drive was reindexed.  Awesome I thought.  Fired up Time Machine… and again it stuck on “Preparing…”  I let that go for hours before finally giving up.

Hopefully this is a widespread enough problem that Apple introduces a patch, or some instructions on fixing the problem as I would like to be able to use Time Machine again, especially after seeing how while it recovered my machine after a drive failure.  In the time being I will continue updating drive clone images with Carbon Copy Cloner, as well as continuing all my other back up practices.

Edit 1 (13:13 EST): This is the error message that I receive over and over: “8/8/09 1:13:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B)(Error) IndexCI in CIMetaInfoCreate:Tried to create index when index already existed /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/0111E1B8-84EC-4CBD-8233-CD50D5F40A6B”

I’ve also gotten:  ”8/8/09 1:14:27 PM mds[23] (/Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA)(Error) IndexCI in ContentIndexOpenBulk:Could not open /Volumes/Backup of Otis/.Spotlight-V100/Store-V1/Stores/7354B10D-A419-47E1-9EB5-1A89A95436FA/0.; needs recovery “

Edit 2(August 14, 4:11 EST): Well it seems that the problem actually has to do with 10.5.8 and the most recent build of Mozy for the Mac (1.4 I seem to recall).  While Mozy was working fine it was doing some weird cosmic thing to certain sets of permissions that caused Time Machine to throw up all sorts of errors.  I uninstalled Mozy (saved the prefs) and Time Machine immediately started working like nothing had ever happened.

Apple TV: The Follow Up.

A while ago I did a post when we got our AppleTV.  I promised a followup after I had played around with it for a bit, but fell out of the habit of updating this blog.  Well I’ve certainly had plenty of time to play with the AppleTV and I thought now that I was trying to update this a little more frequently I’d follow up on some posts of the past, and this one seemed like a good one to start with.

After playing with the AppleTV for a little bit it was time to get down to the business of hacking it so that it could play a multitude of video formats as well as allow the attachment of an external storage device.  There are lots of instructions online for rolling your own hacks on to a USB key, but out of laziness, and the fact I’m willing to let better qualified people do the work for me, I went with the guys at aTV Flash.  They frequently update the software which is especially helpful as some of Apple’s updates to the units firmware can tend to break the things you so meticulously went about hacking.

The 160GB internal storage of the AppleTV wasn’t going to cut it once I started making digital copies of my DVD’s to transfer to the device.  We ended up hooking up a 1TB external USB drive to it, which was a snap.  I formatted it as HFS+ Journaled, plugged it in to the AppleTV, and it was immediately recognized.  I was able to FTP in to the unit and copy files over to the external HD.  After the finished copying the were accessible through the AppleTV’s menu – specifically in the “DVD” section of the expanded menu that appears after initially hacking the unit.  For ripping the video I find that Handbrake’s default settings work quite well – a great compromise between file size and quality of both picture and sound.

One of the other benefits that came from hacking the device is access to Hulu (along with other services)through Boxee.  I’ve watched some old episodes of ALF for nostalgic purposes as well as a few other gems (Airwolf and Knight Rider in particular).  It’s hit or miss with newer episodes of some shows through Hulu, but I use it more when I don’t know what I want to watch as opposed to stay current with series I follow.  More recent series I’ve slowly been acquiring from the Apple Store.  Following the series that I do as well as purchasing a couple I haven’t seen in awhile works out to the same, if not a little cheaper than the cable bill had been.  Boxee has also enabled me to have access to every episode of South Park that has been made thus far – something I take frequent advantage of.

The AppleTV has been working great as a replacement for live TV.  Yes, I do miss popping on the occasional football or hockey game, but I can always go to a friends house or one of the sports bars in town to see those.  I certainly haven’t felt any less transitioning to this digital centered, cable tv free lifestyles.

Apple TV has arrived!

My bright and shiny new Apple TV arrived today.  I’ve been looking at them ever since they came out, and decided I wanted one after the Take 2 software was released.  Finally the day came to actually purchase one.  I have to say that initially pairing it with a computer can get a bit wonky.  Right off the bat it wanted to suddenly synch all my media files via iTunes.  I had to cancel that and dig throuhg a few menus to eventually figure out what I wanted.  The synching is quite like it is for my iPod Touch.  After clicking through a few menus I was able to synch only what I wanted, and keep it from displaying the items that I didn’t synch (it does this in case you want to stream files from your computer directly from your computer).  If you’re going to be syncing via a laptop I suggest you have both the laptop and the Apple TV plugged directly in to your router rather than using wifi as the wireless connection can be slow if sync’ing an entire media library.

Once I had some shows on it, it ran like a champ.  Denise and I watched National Treasure 2 which I purchased through the iTunes store on my laptop while we were in Maui.  It ran smoothly and both the picture and audio were great.  I didn’t get the lagginess some people say they experienced during action scenes in movies.  There was no pixelization either, just clear DVD-looking quality video.  Now we’re watching an episode of Torchwood that I converted with a great program called VisualHub.

My initial reaction to it are pretty positive.  The biggest cons I’ve found is the limited selection of video formats that it can play (this can be fixed by hacking the machine.. something I’ll be looking in to), and the fact that you can’t simply plug in a big external hard drive for additional storage (again, something that can be accomplished with a little hacking).  I’ll follow up more after I’ve played with it more.