High quality phone headset for Mac

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

These will be big for making personal voice calls from the cube computer in one's office:

The Sennheiser M145 is a computer and multimedia headset that combines high-fidelity stereo headphones with a hands-free, noise-canceling microphone. The headset includes a dedicated USB adapter with built-in soundcard electronics. Designed to be plug-and-play with any Mac OS up through Mac OS X 10.4, the Sennheiser M145 is $120. (Sennheiser web site not yet updated.)

The best part of OS X 10.4.2? Simple Finder for kids

Apple - Mac OS X - Family

My new machine came with Tiger. So far it's mostly a posterior pain. Old software has to be upgraded, the install is bigger, Spotlight insists on indexing peripheral drives it should ignore, I can't see how to constrain search to a path, and Quartz Extreme is still disabled and Retrospect has no Tiger support in their (orphaned post acquistion?) Windows based Mac backup (you can use the Retrospect/Mac client -- but that's not a licensed use and it's not supported).

There are a lot of nice touches, but I don't see any big advantage in Tiger for me over 10.3.9. Given a choice, I'd still choose LaunchBar over Spotlight, and I had to pay $10 for the new version of Launchbar after I upgraded!

With one exception. In 10.4.2 the 'Simple Finder' (managed user option -- Children) is very nice. It was broken badly in 10.0-10.3, so it's great to see it back. The Simple Finder now supports multiple 'windows' based on the number of icons in a folder, and there's an option (choose from menu) to break out to the full finder. So an administrator can now log in as a child, then configure the system as needed, then return to child!

The kid support is almost worth the upgrade.

The Missing Sync for Palm OS -- and the sadness of iCal

The Missing Sync for Palm OS - Synchronize Mac OS X and Palm OS

The web site doesn't emphasize this, but you can use Missing Sync for free for a two week evaluation period. I started today -- it looks very good. A breath of fresh air. I was able to remove the festering, parasitic, incompetent mess that's Palm Desktop from my Tiger machine.

On the other hand, there's iCal. Wow. So much hype for something so feeble. No 'categories' for tasks? You must be joking! I thought the Palm data model was feeble, but iCal makes it look pretty darned complex. There's no way this would handle any kind of demanding workplace.

Looks like Entourage and Missing Sync with a PocketPC device are the best PDA solution for the Mac. This may work ok for my wife however.

Missing sync has a good list of supported conduits.

The mythical Palm OS X uninstaller

Palm's web site has a description of the Palm Desktop OS X 'uninstall' procedure:

Removing (uninstalling) Palm Desktop for Macintosh: "# Continue through the Software License Agreement windows by clicking on AGREE, the Palm Desktop Installer window appears.
# In the top left corner of the window, click on the dropdown menu and select UNINSTALL. Directly beneath this menu, place a check to select Palm Desktop software.

Having tried this about six times, I'm reasonably sure there's no such dropdown menu in the current release.

I did use the Installer's show files option -- the Palm installer puts a horribly long list of gunk in the System Library and elsewhere. No wonder this is such a festering sore.

Restoring Retrospect data to an OS X disk image

When my iBook crashed my last complete system backup was only 8 hours old (for once, somehow, Retrospect worked). It was easy to restore all my data to the G5 iMac. I wanted, however, a disk image of the iBook that I could use to either clone a new version of the old drive or as reference. I find disk images very handy for that purpose.

How could I do this?

Actually, it was pretty easy. Here's what I did:

1. Create a sparse disk image on iMac of 15 GB (Tiger Disk Utility has a GB and TB option now.) Give it the same name as the old, extinct, drive (eg. iBookDrive.sparseimage) - I think that may be pretty important.
   
2. Mount image.
3. In Retrospect Professional for Windows 6.5 open client view and go to tools. The mounted image appears as a volume. Select it so it's "known" to Retrospect.
4. Do a complete volume restore to the mounted image.
   

That's it. Disk Utility reports the resulting image is bootable. I have a hunch this method may also be the only effective way to create a true restore from Retrospect! (Create image as above from Retrospect backup, mount iBook using target disk mode, clone using Disk Utility.)

Update 8/4: Well, it kind of worked as a boot image -- but only with some massaging and not all that well. OS X Disk Utility rejected using it to create a boot sector; some kind of error condition. Carbon Copy Cloner did use it, but the permissions were completely wrong (an issue with Retrospect, you have to disable permissions when doing a Retrospect restore, didn't do that on the image, I don't know if it's possible). I had to use Disk Utility to restore permissions and I safe booted. At that point the image did work, but some extensions didn't work. I gave up and used another image -- this was just an experiment to see if the image I create above could be used to clone a bootable disk.

[1] I'm using the Retrospect 6.0/Mac client on my Tiger machine -- a temporary option while I figure out how to replace Retrospect entirely -- but that's another story.

OS X file sharing: truly weird

Mac OS: How to Connect to File Sharing or Apple File Services (AFP)

I've used OS X for about 3 years now. File sharing has always been odd. SMB sharing finally works well, but today I enabled sharing from an Apple server.

I had a hard time figuring it out. I started with the IP address -- that worked using afp://10.0.0.1. Then I researched and learned this would work too: afp://MyMachineName.local -- but the .local was required. Lastly I learned that if you browse for the server it's in Network:Local, not in Servers where one, instead, can find the name of the client machine.

Don't tell me that's not weird. It also takes a few seconds on my iBook for the remote share to appear, I had to wait a bit.

I think I'll use the 'scrap' technique I use with my SMB shares to create a simpler reference.

Lastly, somewaht contradictory to the documentation, if you login with a username and password that matches an admin account on the host machine, you can browse everything the local admin can (I only tested a write to my own server directory).

None of this is anywhere near as transparent as the OS Classic approach -- and that wasn't too simple either.

Weird.

One does get a nice choice of file sharing protocols however: smb, afp, ftp, etc.

AbiWord: Read and Write DOC files (free)

AbiWord Downloads

I'll try the new version on my Mac. We need something lightweight to both read and write doc files.

Windows smart phone sync to a Mac -- yes!

Mark/Space brings Windows smart phone sync to Mac | The Register

The Mac PDA/phone universe has just grown significantly.

My iBook failure: I think it's the logic board defect

Apple - Discussions - What does ata 1/6/13 HD 2,0 mean?

One advantage of being an Apple customer is that there's an very helpful community of users that offsets some of Apple's "industry-standard" quality control issues. On an Apple iBook forum an expert aide points out my iBook's apparent drive failure may well be a logic board failure. Here's what I wrote back:

Ronda,

Thank you so much. I thought this was a hard drive failure, but I started the iBook in target disk mode and thrashed it (SMART didn't work in this mode). I repartitioned, erased, put on a DOS partition, erased, put on a Mac partition, copied 15GB of data to it -- the drive never hiccoughed.

I then cloned a backup image [1] and the system ran -- sort of. A Retrospect restore worked for a while, then stopped. On one restart I got a blank blue screen -- but a remote computer indicated the retrospect client was running. On another restart I got the disk not found (again).

I've reset nvram from open firmware boot and, especially, after the various repartitionings, erasures and original CD reinstalls I'm sure there's no software or drive data corruption remaining.

So I've eliminated software and I'm increasingly confident that the drive itself is ok. That does tend to implicate the logic board.

Of course the program ended March 18th, 2005 or 3 years past purchase -- and my system was purchsed June 2002, so in theory I'm out of range. Of course I'll call anyway.

Thank you,

john

[1] I've survived at least 4 major drive crashes over 15 years with very little data loss -- I have backups like some people have shoes.

F/U to come.

Update: No luck with Apple! They charge $50 to talk to a product specialist, $200 or so to look at it (and if it doesn't have the original 128MB memory stick they send it back unfixed!), and more beyond that.

First Tech Computing, a local authorized Apple dealer, will charge $40 to look at it and then will tell me what a repair costs. I'll pay for First Tech, and if I end up having the logic board replaced I'll take phone Apple Customer Relations at 800-767-2775.

Update 7/30: The very last thing I did was to create two partitions on the iBook, 1GB and the rest. I cloned to the "remainder" and left the 1GB empty. It's still running. I think the effect is coincidental (ie, the problem will recurr), but it's interesting. I'd hypothesized that if there is a drive problem, it might occur in the heavily used initial portions of the drive and that this maneuver might shuffle critical files out of that area. I'm using the iBook purely as a "thin client" for now.

Crashing iBook: is it the logic board?

Apple - Support - iBook - Expanded Logic Board Repair Extension Program - FAQ My iBook is just one month beyond its 3 year anniversary, and it seems dead. I thought it was the hard drive, but that tests out very well in target disk mode. I wonder if it's the logic board ...

Tiger - moving mail from an 10.3 Mail.app

Apple - Mac OS X

There are several ways to move Mail.app data into Tiger when switching machines. You can use Apple's data migration utility, but I prefer to move more gradually. (Mail.app data structures changed in Tiger to fit Spotlight.)

I logged in on my Tiger account and copied all my ~/Library/Mail files to the new machine. Then I tried two approaches. The second is better:

1. Fire up Mail.app. Create a new account. Import old content using the built-in import function. This brings in only mailbox data.

2. Delete everything in ~/Library/Mail on the new machine (eg. data from #1). Copy the Mail files from old machine in here. Start Mail.app. It imports mail and configuration data.


At first I created a new mailbox and used the Mail.app import function to imp

SuperDuper: clones and creates bootable startup disk -- even in 10.4.2

SuperDuper

A very sophisticated approach to recovering data from a dead drive: using a linux utility with OS X Tiger

macosxhints - 10.4: Recover a dead hard drive using GNU ddrescue

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

macosxhints - Move an iTunes library to a new machine

Read the whole thread, there's more than approach. I've noted this before I think, but it's newly relevant to me.

Good advice on cleaning up after a crash and a force quit

Apple - Discussions - G3 - after the crash

Apple forum advice for recovering from an 'out of drive space' crash:

... it might be that a force quit left behind some huge cache files, making things worse.

If that's the case, you might locate them by asking File>Find to search for invisible files whose size is, say, greater than 50MB…

Either way if you're trying to clear a G3-vintage disk, it probably needs at least 10% of its total space free to avoid exactly this kind of situation.

Also for future refernce - though you may have already tried it this time - when you get the kind of trouble warning you got, then if you can actually clear the warning it may not be necessary to do anything else but wait. When you've used up pretty well all of both disk and RAM, files that normally open quite quickly can take minutes extra, giving the impression that nothing's happening and making force quit too tempting…