by Christopher Paul on September 9, 2012 From time to time, I declare bankruptcy. Not in the financial sense but in the reading and computer sense.
Sometimes, I can’t get through all my RSS feeds and I have to mark the hundreds of items as ‘Read’ just so I don’t see 300+ unread items in Reeder. When I was a PC user, I’d frequently reinstall Windows because, let’s face it, after three hours it was infected with a virus and starting to crawl to a halt. Recently, I’ve done the extreme with my Mac.
Since I had to replace my hard drive anyway, I figured I’d refrain from installing the dozens of apps that I had on the previous install. No more iLife, iWork, writing apps, utilities, extensions, plugins, browsers, etc. All gone.
I refuse to install Flash, Chrome, Firefox. No more Fantastical (although it’s a great app). No miscellaneous design apps to pick colors, create gradients, copy special characters to the clipboard. No Instagram apps. No Facebook or Twitter menubar apps. Nothing but the following:
- iPhoto (for iCloud photo stream and I know it’s not perfect)
- 1Password
- Byword
- MarsEdit
I’ve installed Fever and will be using that as my RSS feed reader and I’ve done away with all my feeds and will slowly add them back in to make sure I don’t get inundated with a bunch of junk I’ll have to mark all as read later, anyway. I’m keeping my music in the cloud; I’ll stream what I want. I have all of my data backed up on Time Machine so if I need it, I can get it.
I found that I never listened to most of my music or used half the apps I downloaded so why have them take up space and computer resources? And instead of uninstalling everything, I just used my hardware failure as a chance to start over.
I feel lighter already.
by Christopher Paul on September 8, 2012 Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD isn’t approved for sale by the FCC:
”A pre-order confirmation email sent by Amazon late on Thursday, September 6, for the $499 Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch 4G tablet included the following note: “We will send you an email asking you to confirm your pre-order of Kindle Fire when it is approved for sale by the Federal Communications Commission.””
Makes me wonder why they need FCC approval in the first place if they can go manufacture them without the Government’s ok.
by Christopher Paul on September 7, 2012 Oktoberfest might be postponed to November:
The brewers aren’t out of beer — there’s plenty of that to go around, they say. The trouble is that makers of beers like Paulaner and Hacker-Pschorr don’t have enough bottles to supply the festival. In some cases, they’ve fallen tens of thousands of bottles behind their production schedule. Other say their kegs are in short supply.
The reason for the shortage? The warm weather (I blame global warming) has encouraged more drinking and the brewers haven’t had enough time to wash and reuse the bottles.
I always keep a steady supply queued up for this reason. You can never be too careful and let your beer list dwindle. If I were Chancellor Merkel, I’d declare a national state of notfall until the crisis is resolved.
by Christopher Paul on September 7, 2012 With fall product announcements in full swing, everyone was speculating what Apple’s new iPhone will be called. We know believe it’s going to be called the iPhone 5 but still have no idea what a new, smaller, iPad will be called (if it even exists though everyone thinks it’s a matter of when not if).
Since I started thinking about possible names, Apple’s invite went out and everyone assumed that the phone will be called the iPhone 5 even though it’s strictly not the fifth iPhone. Motorola announced three new Android phones with crazy names. Nokia announced a new phone with a slightly familiar brand. And Amazon launched a slew of new devices under the Kindle identity.
More and more people started writing about the names of these devices and a simple link/commentary post wasn’t enough for me. So I’m curating a few links here with some rather interesting insight into the naming of things.
First off: Horace Dediu’s article, 5, where he talks about Apple’s naming history and how, with some products and time, the conventions have changed.
Next, I’ll want to point you to Marko Savic’s post: The Naming of Things where he breaks down Apple’s core naming convention. It builds on Dediu’s article and he offers a bit more insight on the pricing and use of the device and the connotations that get promoted with a name.
Then, read MG Siegler’s quick link on the new Motorola phones. I’ve always been confused with phone names and numbering conventions and their’s is no different. When I saw a friend on Facebook ask for an Android phone recommendation I looked up the new models and couldn’t track the differences in the dozens of models that are offered. Motorola isn’t the only one who does this but it is confusing. In the end, I didn’t even bother to research an Android phone to use. My instinct was to say iPhone 5 and the sales clerks would just point them to the phone of their choice, anyway.
Jerry Herman is next with a quick reason why Apple dropped the number convention from this year’s iPad.
Finally, a small deviation from phones and tablets to Apple’s OS X where XKCD humorously points out that there are ‘problems’ with Apple’s desktop/laptop naming convention.
by Christopher Paul on September 7, 2012 My MacBook Pro’s hard drive started to make noises I wasn’t comfortable hearing so I made a Time Machine backup last night and installed a solid state drive this morning. The hardware install was a breeze. Creating a backup USB drive for Mountain Lion wasn’t as easy but there was great documentation on the web so as long as you’re comfortable with Disk Utility, you can do it, too. But once I was done with creating the backup and recovery disk, getting my computer back to where it was before was a breeze. In fact, it was so fast, it inspired me to tell the non-Mac users out there how easy it was.
Of course, your mileage may vary and I am a tech guy so I know my way around computers – inside and out – so I know I have a slight advantage but I’ll break down the steps I took so far:
- Install OS X (I’m using Mountain Lion).
- Wait 20 minutes while the system installs.
- Sign into iCloud/Apple ID.
- Start using your computer.
Yes, it was four steps.
Granted, there is more you can do – like restore your Time Machine backup, redownload your apps and such from the Mac App Store, and whatnot. Since Apple gives you all the basic tools you need to get to your information, you’ll have everything back in the 10 minutes or so it takes for iCloud to sync all your data back to your computer.
Within minutes, all my calendar entries, contacts, emails, music, and Safari bookmarks – among a few other things – were restored. The total reinstall time was 30 minutes; I timed it.
Sure, an SSD is faster than a hard drive. But my MBP is a late 2008 model. I bought it in February of 2009. The processor is no slouch but it’s not the faster models of today. And I didn’t restore anything from Time Machine, yet. I might not, either since I rather like a clean install.
While I know that Apple’s software has bugs just like everyone’s, the speed and ease in which it took to get my laptop running on a blank hard drive with all my critical data restored was amazing. It just worked – seamlessly and quickly. I usually tout Apple’s products for this reason but even I was impressed with a 30 minute install/restore time.