The Adventures of Systems Boy!
Taking the iPhone 3GS on the subway will repeatedly get its compass all out of whack. It sits and spins in all directions. Eventually it produces this screen:
I don't know how the compass works in the phone. But I'd venture a guess that the big, giant electrified track might have something to do with the "Interference" referenced in the alert.
Fun stuff. Love the figure 8. Very classy.
Is that, like, a nautical thing?
The first release candidate for Firefox 3.5 came out yesterday, and with it a slightly different application icon.
The old icon looked like this:
And here's the new icon:
Personally, I think it looks swell. It's a big enough change to be noticeable, but subtle enough to retain the brand identity and not be visually jarring. Just a wee bit fierier along its bottom edge, It even looks good in my Dock:
I've just downloaded RC 1, but I've been using the betas for some time now. I've had really no problems to speak of and have enjoyed the speed increases and new functionality. This minor icon change is a good representation of the sort of attention to detail you're starting to see a lot of in Firefox. While they still haven't addressed my biggest complaint, I can certainly say I recommend this latest version of Firefox.
UPDATE:
I've just downloaded this for another computer and it appears they've pulled the new icon. Today's release is still being called "RC1," but it now sports a "3.5b4" version number. Too bad. I hope they bring back the new icon in a later release. I like it.
UPDATE 2:
Actually, what seems to be going on is that the update that gets downloaded from the RC1 web page is different from the one that gets downloaded via Firefox's Update preference pane.
This was not the case the other day. The version on the web page is now 3.5b4 (Beta 4), as it now states in the fine print. But download that and Firefox will still prompt you to download a newer version (which prompt, oddly, links back to the confused download web page). The newer version that Firefox downloads has the updated icon. I'm not sure why they pulled this newer version from the web page. That's mighty strange. But, for the record, what's currently on the web page is not the release candidate. It is beta 4. You've been warned.
UPDATE 3:
Today the web page links to the new RC2, which does have the new icon. Wow! That was fast!
I had the oddest thing happen to me recently. I was changing my Desktop picture, and I navigated to one of the fuller image folders in the Desktop pane of the System Preferences, and as the images loaded I saw a progress bar at the bottom of the window. I'd never seen this before.
I decided to grab a screen capture of this phenomenon for possible posting here on the blog. Navigating away from the pane and then selecting it again, however, no progress bar appeared. Clearly there was cache afoot.
The cache file that governs when and how long you'll see this progress bar is:
~/Library/Caches/Desktop/NameOfFolder_STRING.dpCache
Where "NameOfFolder" is the name of the folder in Desktop prefs that contains all those images you're trying to look at.
Quitting the System Preferences app, deleting this file, then reopening the Desktop preference pane and selecting the image laden folder reactivated the progress bar and allowed me, at last, to snap this:
An odd aside: the progress bar appears to actually be a separate window, or possibly a sheet, as evidenced by the fact that using command-shift-4-hover-spacebar-click (wherein only the desired window is grabbed by the screen capture utility, and, not coincidentally, my usual method of screen cap) to make the screen grab produced the following image:
So maybe you're asking yourself: Is any of this useful information? Um, no. Not really. It's purely academic.
And yet I find it fascinating.
Hello, and happy Mother's Day!
My mom recently switched over to the Mac platform, and she wanted to take a photo for me. I told her she could use the built-in iSight camera and PhotoBooth on her MacBook Pro to take the shot, but she couldn't figure out how to do it.
No problem, Mom. Let me see if I can help you out.
My guess is that you're still a little unfamiliar with where to find applications on the Mac. This is pretty typical of switchers. All your applications are in a folder aptly named "Applications" at the top level of your hard drive. That's the silvery-gray thing on your Desktop. It's probably called "Macintosh HD."
Open it up by double-clicking it.
A window should open with a folder inside it called "Applications." Open that as well with a double-click.
Now you should see a fairly lengthy list of items. These are all your applications. Some items in this list are the actual, executable applications themselves. Some are folders that contain the applications. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. Fortunatly, PhotoBooth is easy: Scroll down until you see the item named "PhotoBooth," and — yup, you got it — double-click it to open it.
You should now be staring at an interface, at the center of which should appear your very own face. This is because the camera is now active and PhotoBooth is showing you what it sees. Since the camera is located at the top center edge of the computer display screen, it sees you.
To take a picture, simply press the red button. A short countdown will occur, a flash and then, voila! A picture will appear at the bottom of the PhotoBooth interface. To look at the picture, simply click it once and it will appear in the main frame of the application window.
From this viewing mode you can email the picture by pressing the "Email" button on the left hand side of the tool bar towards the bottom of the application window.
To switch back to photo mode, press the round camera button in the center of the tool bar and continue taking photos to your heart's content. Photos can also be dragged directly from the strip of shots at the bottom of the window to anywhere you'd want to put them: the Desktop, an email, wherever. You can also arrange them in iPhoto if you want, by pressing the iPhoto button. But I'll leave it for you to explore beyond that.
Hopefully this will help you out, Mom. If not we can go over it next time we see each other.
Enjoy your Mac!
Burn Folders are special folders you can create in the Mac OS X Finder for burning data to optical media — CDs and DVDs. But the way they're implemented can be confusing, and that confusion can lead to data loss. Fortunately, there are ways to recover.
Creating a Burn Folder is easy; simply choose "New Burn Folder" from the Finder's File menu. This will create "Burn Folder.fpbf" on the Desktop, from which you can burn data to an optical disc. Dragging items to this folder will create aliases to those items rather than actually copying the data. This saves time and prevents the unnecessary duplication of data. Unfortunately, unless you know that Burn Folders are populated with aliases, and you know exactly how those aliases work, it can also lead to some confusion, and this confusion can get you in to trouble.
To wit: Let's say I create my Burn Folder. I start dragging files to it. Some folders too. Finally I finish and go to burn my disc, but I'm told that I have too much data in my Burn Folder, and that I need to remove some in order to make it fit on my media. Great. So I open up my Burn Folder. Inside are some smallish files, and a folder called "Backups" that holds the bulk of my intended burn data. So I open up Backups and start trashing files. Eventually the Burn Folder becomes small enough to fit on my optical disc. I burn the disc and then empty the Trash.
Later I return to my Backups folder to find that when I emptied the Trash it deleted the actual data from Backups. Wait, what? How did that happen?
Well, if you recall, everything in my Burn Folder is an alias. Actually, that's not quite accurate. Everything at the top level of my Burn Folder is an alias. This means that when I opened the alias to the Backups folder it opened the actual Backups folder. And so, once in this folder, when I began deleting files I was deleting the actual data.
Dude. That is so not cool.
See, the way I see it there are a few problems with how all this works. First and foremost, the Finder is for people who aren't particularly concerned with how the Finder works, and Burn Folders should be geared towards the same folks. These folks may or may not know exactly how an alias works either, or even why it exists. But this lack of knowledge should never, ever lead to data loss under ordinary use-cases, particularly those in which the user is actually trying to make a fucking backup. Ever. Period.
Second, this method violates two preexisting paradigms, one of which belongs to Apple themselves, and the other of which has been around since the beginning of burning optical media. This first method to which I refer is Apple's Panther Finder. In Panther (and yes, this is just one more reason to loathe Tiger) the Finder would copy the data to the Burn Folder. Yes, this would take more time and create redundant data. But it also protected that data from deletion and was a much closer analog of what was actually going on: I put data in a Burn Folder, and now that data — not pointers to the data — is there in that Burn Folder. What we have now is confusing — some items in the folder are aliases, and some aren't — and, once again, can lead to data loss. And, as we all know by now, that's, uh, what's the word? Right. Bad.
The other method I refer to comes from a little application called Toast. For forever and a day, Toast has simply pointed to the referenced data on disc, but has lacked any ability to actually affect that data. And why would it? Toast is not a file manager, it's a disc burning utility, and you can't delete data from your disc burning utility. One of the problems with the current method is that it puts data burning and file management in the same application when they probably should be separated. This is why burning data from the Finder has always seemed aberrant to me. It's just the wrong application for the job.
The knowledge of these preexisting methods can further confuse even the tech-savviest. In fact, when the aforementioned scenario actually happened to someone I know, it took a great deal of time for me just to suss out what had occurred. It just shouldn't be possible.
The upside to all of this is that in the wake of this calamity I've had the tremendous (mis)fortune of testing the latest crop of data recovery programs. Some time ago a client of mine had deleted some data, and back then there was only one contender for retrieving deleted files. The field seems to have matured, however, and now there are several. Disk Doctors Mac Data Recovery gets some good press, though I only kicked its tires myself. VirtualLab's Data Recovery also seemed to fare well in some cursory tests. There are even a handful of others out there of unknown quality and distinction. But for our calamity we turned to the oldest app I can recall in the field, the one I'd looked at for my client lo those many years ago: Data Rescue II, by ProSoft Engineering.
Should you ever have to undertake such a project, there are a few things you should know. First and foremost: the less you use the disk from which you want to recover data, the better your chances at recovery. See, erasing a file doesn't actually delete anything, it only marks the file as free for writing to. Writing to the drive increases the probability that deleted data will be overwritten. Once that happens you won't be able to recover the data. So your first step should always be to take the drive out of service, i.e. turn that shit off. And don't turn it back on until you're ready to recover the lost data.
In our case, the disk we were recovering from was a 1TB firewire hard drive. It being an external drive made our chances at recovery better, but its size meant we'd have to wait a while to even see if the data would be recoverable. Fortunately, Data Rescue II allows you to scan your drive in demo mode without purchasing the software. If it finds your files, you can then pay for the software (it costs $99 bucks) and recover the data.
Our scan took about 16 hours. We let it run overnight, and by early the next afternoon Data Rescue had found deleted files. In this process the file names get munged, so there was no way to tell for sure if these were in fact our deleted files, but the number and size seemed about right. We coughed up the dough, recovered the files (to a separate hard drive), and were happy to discover a near 100% recovery. There were a few files that were only partially recovered. These tended to be the oldest of the bunch which, yes, we have backups of. So we're saved! Oh happy day!
I can't help thinking that Apple's Burn Folder approach is fatally flawed. It's just not Mom-friendly. Perhaps it would work better if they made every file in the Burn Folder an alias. But it seems dubious at best to put burn functionality in the Finder without certain safeguards, and these safeguards are already present when the burning mechanism is separate from the file manager. The good news is that if you do happen to lose data by way of emptying the trash there are a number of options these days for recovering that data. And if you're quick and careful about it, your chances of success are pretty good.
Addendum:
For reference, or should the above-mentioned products fail to satisfy, here are some others I heard about but did not try:
Subrosa Software's File Salvage
Stellar Data Recovery's Macintosh Data Recovery
Boomerang Data Recovery Software (which looks suspiciously like the VirtualLab product)
