Dec 5th, 08
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While I love the iPhone. I have to say some of it’s quirks are really annoying. Here’s my list. If anyone can find work arounds let me know.
1. Activesync doesn’t work in airplane mode! Man ur on an airplane reading your exchange mail and it won’t delete messages. Just says can’t do it. Works fine with IMAP. Who doesn’t need to read and delete mail?
2. Dial anything. Ur looking at your calendar. There is the conference call number but u can’t dial it. Blackberry allows u to dial anything that looks a phone number.
3. Edit contacts. U can only edit an entry that u search for. If u call someone notice their contact info is wrong, u have to re-search for gem because iPhone has this strange idea there is a read-only contact form and an edit one. Should just be one so u can fix contacts anywhere
4. U see some text on the web and want to copy it over. Why is there. I general copy and paste.
5. There is no way to delete a photo other than thru the photo app. Like contacts there is this idea of view only and edit panes why? If u see a photo u should just be able to delete doesn’t matter where it came from.
6. Return exactly where u were. With blackberry if u task switch say to look at email for an address when u flip back to say the contact app ur exactly where u left it. So u can edit lookup and return. Buy with the iPhone apps just return to their start state so U look up. Then u have to write down on scratch paper the phone number and then search again for the contact. Worse yet if u partially edit and switch then u lose all edits! Arrgh.
Sep 8th, 08
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EA is going to town on the iPhone. I like these games, hope they don’t crash too much. My favorite will be Sim City and the golf game!
Sep 7th, 08
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Well the Mac isn’t immunie to strange problems. At various times I’ve noticed syslogd (the logging daemon), the spindump and kernel_task all spinning at 100% cpu utilization. Not really clear what is causing it. In one case a flaky
USB hub causes kernel_task problems which makes some sense.
kernel_task uses 70%+ often – Mac Forumskernel_task is the core of OS X. It runs all the device drivers, and other high privilege tasks. If it’s spiking up like that, it could be a bad device driver causing it. Have you checked the logs to see if anything is being reported there? Also, have you installed any 3rd party USB drivers (including printers, scanners, etc) as they are often a cause of problems
In another syslogd hangs on a particular file…
JulianSchrader.de | 100% CPU usage caused by syslogd (Leopard)Over the last few days I experienced a strange bug that didnââ¬â¢t go away even after several times of rebooting ââ¬â a process called syslogd used up to 100 percent of one CPU, which means up to 50% of my computerââ¬â¢s processing power.
After some research, I found the following solution:
Fire up Terminal and execute the following commands (enter administrator password when asked):
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo rm /var/log/asl.db
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
What do these commands do? First of all, we stop the syslogd process. The second line removes a database file which causes the whole dilemma (donââ¬â¢t worry, itââ¬â¢ll be re-created afterwards), the third line starts the previously stopped process again.
kernel_task uses 70%+ often – Mac ForumsWith a hyperactive kernel_task, check the fonts and font cache.
Sep 6th, 08
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I don’t know what is doing it. Entourage, the many synchronizer, but I’ve got 1100 duplicate calendar entries which is depressing since I deleted 500 last week. Time to buy a deduplicator. There don’t seem to be any for Entourage that don’t take weeks to run, so I’m having to do this with Outlook under Parallels. The google:”outlook duplicates” search revelas Mapilab and Sperry both make these. I’ve use Mapilab and it costs a ridiculous $24 to get something that shouldn’t happen. Sigh.
Aug 5th, 08
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It is a 256MB download, so hope you have a fast connection
Apple Releases iPhone Firmware 2.0.1 – Mac Rumors Not clear what has changed, but early claism are
- Backup process for the iPhone is much faster.
- Netshare still works
- SMS typing faster
Apple releases iPhone 2.0.1 Software Update – AppleInsider has a forum thread and here is what users are seeing:
-Contacts are now more responsive.
Sync problems are fixed. It will backup the first time you sync after the update. The updates after that for me have only synced data in about 15 seconds rather than requiring a backup on every sync before.
fixed the lagging keyboard in e-mail and texting
iPod lags are much improved as well.
Email loads appear to be quicker.
Browsing names in the address book, switching between the keypad, addressbook, voicemail is instantaneous. Thank God! Much faster all-around. The camera boots up in half the time it used to.
Jul 31st, 08
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AppleInsider claims that September is when we’ll see the refreshed MacBook, MacBook Pro and iPod lines. Makes sense as the iPod line is usually refreshed in time for the holiday season.
The best rumors are a MacBook Touch which would be a tablet. The MacBook and MacBook Pro are supposed to get a more curvy shape.
Jul 23rd, 08
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These are just stunning numbers and of course the stock traded down since they are explaining that there will be margin pressure. Most interesting:
- Mac YTY unit growth is 41%
- Looks like they will refresh MacBook and MacBook Pro and prices are coming down the entry level MacBook Pro drops to $1800 from $2000 and the MacBook to $1000. These are very aggressive prices for sure.
- iPod YTY is 11% (I’m sure iPhone are taking away)
- Appstore shows 25M downloads
- Of the 2.5M Macs, 500K were sold by Apple retail (amazing!)
- iPhone flying off the shelf and are out of stock in 38 states.
- There are rumors of a MacBook Touch or maybe a Blackberry-sized iTouch. No one knows.
Jul 20th, 08
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I have two different problems now. First, the Time Capsule at work is
preparing forever. No one really has a resolution to this. I’ve run it for 24 hours and it never stops preparing. I really don’t want to lose my backups, but not sure what to do. Maybe take it home over the weekend forever.
Some folks recommend limiting the files you backup (the point is a whole disk recovery!) or turning off Spotlight. I don’t know…
You can check the
system log by going to:
# /Applications/Utilities/Console which is a confusing application.
# On the left side, there are many Log files and many different entries. Click on
All Messages# You want to search for the backup process called
backupd by going to the search box at the upper right and typing
backupd and pressing enter
Here is an example of a good backup log:
un 6 18:31:01 livy fseventsd41: log dir: /Volumes/Backup of livy/.fseventsd getting new uuid: 3F939294-8F0D-493B-956B-FFB2CC5B5334
Jun 6 18:31:01 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Disk image /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk/livy_001b632ffd76.sparsebundle mounted at: /Volumes/Backup of livy
Jun 6 18:31:01 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Backing up to: /Volumes/Backup of livy/Backups.backupdb
Jun 6 18:31:01 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Ownership is disabled on the backup destination volume. Enabling.
Jun 6 18:31:01 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Event store UUIDs don’t match for volume: Macintosh HD
Jun 6 18:31:03 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Backup content size: 88.8 GB excluded items size: 48.0 GB for volume Macintosh HD
Jun 6 18:31:03 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: No pre-backup thinning needed: 48.97 GB requested (including padding), 879.05 GB available
Jun 6 18:31:03 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Waiting for index to be ready (906 > 0)
Jun 6 18:31:18 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Waiting for index to be ready (909 > 0)
Jun 6 20:55:47 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Copied 226484 files (34.7 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jun 6 20:55:53 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: No pre-backup thinning needed: 543.2 MB requested (including padding), 841.58 GB available
Jun 6 20:56:27 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Copied 366 files (4.0 MB) from volume Macintosh HD.
Jun 6 20:56:30 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Starting post-backup thinning
Jun 6 20:56:30 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: No post-back up thinning needed: no expired backups exist
Jun 6 20:56:30 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Backup completed successfully.
Jun 6 20:56:36 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Ejected Time Machine disk image.
Jun 6 20:56:41 livy kernel: AFP_VFS afpfs_unmount: /Volumes/Time Capsule Disk, flags 0, pid 511
Jun 6 20:56:41 livy /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd125: Ejected Time Machine network volume.
The other issue which just happened is that my Time Capsule seems to hang. The light stays green but it goes offline line like it is crashed. No internet and it disappears as a hard disk. Seems like a hard crash. Hard diagnose but I was doing a big spotlight search of it, so it looks like some bug in the filesystem is hard crashing it.
The
folklore is you need to fix permissions and repair the disk before you do the backup and use a wired Ethernet connection as that seems faster.
Jul 18th, 08
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Too sad that we need MacBook now rather than waiting two weeks!
Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About
Signs are starting to appear that Apple may be prepping for a revision of their Mac laptops in the near future. Following up a previous Commercial Times report that pointed to a Q3 (July-September) order for MacBook displays, the paper now reports that Apple has increased its order of “notebook-use printed circuit boards” by 20% this quarter.
Meanwhile, Apple has notified Best Buy that they would have limited MacBook shipments over the next two weeks. While retail inventories alone aren’t typically an accurate predictor of Apple product refreshes, combined with these other reports it may be more suggestive.
Apple has been rumored to be working on new aluminum MacBook Pro designs that will adopt features of the current iMac and MacBook Air. Intel’s recent Montevina introduction also provides Apple with suitable processor upgrades to power new laptops.
