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Mt. Rainier casts its sunrise shadow 
I can't resist putting up a photo I took this morning before rushing out the door to work. The image was taken during a bright pink and purple sunrise, and if you look carefully at this viewpoint from one top of the back roof of our house you can see the pointy top of Mt. Rainier at the tip of the shadow that it is casting across the sky. Simply awesome. I was simply compelled to rush up to the roof on an icy morning to preserve the image.
Saved by a backup system The lesson that keeping up-to-date backups of all of your files can save your bacon came through for me today. I was at work this morning, taking notes during a meeting on my MacBook Pro, when the battery ran completely out of juice in about 45 minutes, forcing me to shut the lid and work on paper until my meeting was done. When I plugged in the machine back in my office, things weren't working right. So, I started shutting down applications before rebooting the machine, in hopes that a fresh restart after the machine had been running for 10 straight days would help cure whatever was wrong. Everything went well for a while, until I tried to quit Tinderbox. The program simply would not quit. It wouldn't even respond to force quitting. And so, since the machine was unresponsive, I opted to force a reboot. Bad move. When the machine rebooted everything was working except the two Tinderbox files that were running when my I did a forced reboot. So, I lived without Tinderbox for the day. Once I was home, I hooked my machine up to the external hard drive that I back up to each night using SuperDuper over a wireless network connection. It took a little while to open the sparse disk image that I back up to, but once it finished opening I double-checked that I could open the file with Tinderbox, then I dragged yesterday's copy to my MacBook Pro and I was back in business. The last step was to re-create one post to Mac Net Journal that I had made last night, after my daily backup, and everything was back up and running as if nothing had happened. As it turns out, the only data I lost from the crash was the notes I was taking in Tinderbox when my machine locked up. No problem. I'm back in business and happy to know that the very basic daily backup system I use, which runs automatically every night as long as I have my MacBook Pro running within range of my Airport base station. It's backing up again right now. It's a good thing...
Comparing Windows and Mac OSes through the years Gizmodo has a post that will be pointed at by many Mac sites tomorrow. I get a head start tonight, before the comments on the post become a completely tired Mac vs. PC slash fest. Go read Desktop Evolution - Windows and Mac OS Comparison
Seattle Times - Local reading figures offer a bright spot Seattle Times editor-at-large Mike Fancher offers a Pacific Northwest twist on national statistics from the National Endowment for the Arts (PDF) that Americans are reading less: Local reading figures offer a bright spot. I learned over this holiday weekend that the Washington State Library highlighted our latest book, Washington Disasters, on its fall reading list in the Young Adult category. Very cool! This is a nice bonus that comes roughly a year after the book was released. It is interesting that we included chapters in our book that are covered in much more detail in five out of seven of the Adult books listed above our Washington Disasters book. I have added a number of those books to my wish list for this coming Christmas...
If you like design and have worked with fonts, watch Helvetica Tonight I watched the documentary film "Helvetica," and it turned out to be a well-filmed and intriguing piece. As I watched I was reminded of the days when I used to do more tangible work with fonts - desktop publishing, working on a college newspaper at the University of Puget Sound and then writing for newspapers in the 1990s. When I left the world of physical print work in 1994, I stopped playing with fonts and using many of my old friends like Palatino, Garamond and Bookman. On the Web, most fonts are based on Arial or Verdana. One interesting although not surprising note about the Helvetica movie is the number of Mac users among the many typographical designers interviewed for the film. It has always been that way. When design matters, users choose Macs.
Thanksgiving weekend is for the birds  Yesterday, on the day after Thanksgiving here in the U.S., Natalie and I took to the road for some birding at the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge for the Columbian White Tailed Deer here in Washington state, and one of the highlights was a close encounter with a Short-eared Owl. The shot above was taken with a Canon 20D at a distance of about 20 feet, using an image stabilized 70-300 zoom lens. We saw 47 species on an oddly sunny day that was so warm that dragonflies were out and flying.
Leopard gobbling up batteries for others too Information Week has an article about others who are seeing dramatically shorter battery life on their portable Macs after upgrading to Leopard - Apple's Leopard gobbles up batteries, users complain. I need to do more testing on my machine, but so far I have seen battery run times as short as one hour. Some of that could be because the battery on my MacBook Pro is more than a year old, but that can't be the whole answer...
Happy Thanksgiving Happy Thanksgiving to all. May this be a day that we don't live on our Macs. There's more time for that tomorrow, when we can avoid shopping...
Big name bloggers having issues with Apple updates This has been an interesting day to read Scripting News and Robert Scoble's blog. Both Dave Winer of Scripting News and Scoble are having issues with Apple software. Winer has issues with the networking functionality in Leopard, and apparently Scoble and some others are having issues with the latest update to Tiger, 10.4.11. I'll admit that I am not in awe of Leopard, but it has been a pretty solid OS upgrade for me so far. It isn't perfect. I am a little baffled by what is happening to folks like Scoble who installed the latest update for Tiger. What isn't clear to me is whether the update is truly making people's machine's unrecoverable, or whether the issue can be solved by back-tracking to a previous bootable version of Tiger created by a tool like SuperDuper? Meanwhile, I do find it interesting how blogging has made it easy for high profile folks like Winer and Scoble to react to problems they encounter and how other Mac users rip into them when they point out problems with Apple's hardware and software. I think the truth in these matters is that we all have unrealistic expectations, and maybe Apple has helped create or perpetuate those expectations through its marketing campaigns. It is also clear that Apple is missing opportunities to do the right thing and work with these high profile bloggers to ensure that they have a good experience and perpetuate the myth of perfection. Update: Thanks to the MNJ readers who pointed out my mistake in this piece from last night, where I referred to Mac OS X 10.4.11 as Panther. Of course, that is the latest update for Tiger. I had the wrong cat all together...
OmniFocus 1.0 available in January for $80 It was good news to see the announcement yesterday from Ken Case at the OmniGroup in Seattle that OmniFocus - the GTD or task management tool I have been using for many months on my MacBook Pro - is about to have an official release and move out of beta status on Jan. 8, 2008. OmniFocus will sell for $79.95, but it can be pre-purchased now for $39.95. The OmniFocus Web site is also worth checking out if you are curious about this application - especially the 15-minute video of how OmniFocus can be used.
Apples releases Mac OS X 10.5.1 Check your Software Updates panel for the latest update to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). Apple offers this scant info about the update in the panel:
More detailed information in the release notes mention a number of key updates to core programs such as Airport, Disk utilities, iCal, Mail, security and firewall functionality, networking, Time Machine, and the system itself. I am downloading the update now...
If you use Apple pro apps or Panther, check Software Update Just in case you hadn't already heard, you should check Software Update under the Apple menu to grab the latest updates from Apple.
Bento not ready for prime time? TidBITS's Jeff Porten isn't impressed with the preview version of Bento. I still haven't dug into what the lightweight database tool can do, but it looks like Jeff makes some good points... John Gruber is not nearly so dismissive, however. I just pointed out Bento to Natalie and she wants to give it a spin when she gets back home from Washington, D.C.
FileMaker's new Bento preview looks interesting Bento is a "new personal database from Filemaker." It should be interesting to see how this lighter weight database application will fit into the mix of Mac OS X apps. I will be downloading and giving this tool a spin....
Leopard oddities I haven't written much about Leopard since installing it a couple of weeks ago, because so far the new Apple OS has been working pretty well. But I have run into a couple of oddities today that are worth mentioning. First, I had my first signs of an OS issue today when my machine went into overdrive, redlining according to Activity Monitor, and I couldn't figure out what process was running away with all of my CPU and memory capabilities. I quit one application at a time and couldn't find the culprit. So I restarted the machine and so far everything is working fine once again. I'll be keeping an eye out for a repeat of this issue. Mac OS X Hints wrote today about something similar related to Time Machine... Second, ever since installing Leopard I am getting shorter times on the battery life for my slightly more than a year old MacBook Pro. I ran my battery all of the way down last weekend, to do a complete cycle of the battery as Apple recommends you to do every few months. I am seeing slightly longer run times on the battery after running it through a complete cycle, but the battery life is still pretty short. I am not sure if the graphical interface in Leopard is just CPU and battery hungry or what. I do need to note that I am not a Leopard hater. It seems that some Mac users I have read in the last week or two consider Leopard such a step back that they think the Mac is suddenly no more dependable than a Windows machine. I know that change hurts, and I know that every install can have issues, but I am not comfortable with trying to write Leopard off as a dud just yet.
Mobile backups and why I am not using Leopard's TimeMachine One the arguably most innovative features of Leopard is Time Machine, but I haven't been convinced yet that Apple's new backup tool has anything to offer that I can't already do with SuperDuper. Dan Frakes reinforces the reasons that I haven't tried Time Machine yet in this piece - Revisiting the OptiBay with Time Machine. Why not use Time Machine? Here is a list:
I may try Time Machine when it gets the ability to back up over a wireless connection. Until then, I will keep reading the reports of others...
A review of NovaMind 4 Pro Kirk McElhearn offers a review of the newest version of the mind mapping tool, MindMap 4 Pro. |
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