Skype on a Mac - the authoritative review

The best I've seen: TidBITS: Choosing Mac-Compatible Skype Hardware

iPhone without the cellphone plan costs: Activate by prepaid card

A thorough analysis: iPhone + Disposable Cellphone + Prepaid Cards + New Activation Tool = Holy Cow - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). Phone hackers are working overtime on the iPhone, and achieving some nice results. 

How to insure your iPhone and/or laptop - use your home insurance company

Great research from TUAW:

Insure your iPhone, because AT&T won't - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... I decided to call a few insurance companies in the Colorado area to see if they could cover it. What many people might not know is that these companies typically cover electronics like mobile phones and even notebook computers, often at prices far cheaper than extended warranty plans from manufacturers and retail stores. While I'm not entirely familiar with how fast actin' or comprehensive this kind of coverage is from every provider, I do know that mine - State Farm - will cover both hardware failure and accidental damage (though accidental damage will cause my premiums to increase, while an incident like theft will not).

Back to getting coverage for your shiny new phone, however, the summarized rundown I got from calling three of the big general insurance providers (Allstate, Geico and State Farm) is that attaching a clause to a renter or homeowner insurance policy specifically for covering an iPhone would add only $5-20/year to a policy. Keep in mind these were estimates based on a $600 iPhone, and it appears that you can't simply ask these guys to insure a phone; you need to have some kind of a primary policy with them first, then attach this specific clause. Surprisingly, every representative I spoke with knew exactly what an iPhone was, and a couple of them asked me whether I was happy with mine.

I admit, I've been lax. I haven't been insuring my laptop with my homeowners insurance. I need to do that, and if/when I get my iPod do that too. Thanks TUAW.

Resurrect a MacTel killed by a firmware update ...

Once upon a time I was carefully updating the firmware on a peripheral of some sort. As the update proceeded I impulsively moved to recheck the power connector ...

Brick.

Firmware updates can be lethal. Nowadays many devices have a firmware backup that will, at the very least, restore to the original firmware if an update goes bad. Alas, MacBook Pro's don't, and a recent firmware update that improved the optical drive behavior has bricked quite a few laptops. I thought a restore required a trip to Apple service, but it turns out there's a restore CD for the MacTel firmware and Apple has, not coincidentally, just updated it ... 

Apple - Support - Downloads - Firmware Restoration CD 1.3

The Firmware Restoration CD can restore the firmware of an Intel-based Macintosh computer... You can only use this to restore the firmware after an interrupted or failed update... This CD can be created on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macintosh computers.

It won't revert an update, just fix a broken machine. Most of us just need to know this exists, if we brick our machines we can hunt it down then ... I don't know if there's a similar CD for PPC Macs, maybe they have an onboard backup.

Gmail spam filter is running amok again

Gmail's spam filter is running amok again. I just fished some important notices from the spam pile. It used to be if you added an address as a contact the sender was whitelisted, but that's not working any more.

Ironically, Google/Blogger's blog publication notices are particularly prone to be miscategorized as spam.

They were doing pretty well for several months but not any more ...

Retrospect Pro 7.5: It's better than it was

Retrospect is an old name in Macintosh software. It was the "enterprise" backup solution for many educational institutions and some businesses in the early days of the Mac.

When the Mac was dying, sometime after OS 7, Retrospect went into decline. Towards the end time Dantz, who owned it then, created a Windows SOHO product called "Retrospect Pro" that ran on a Windows machine and backed up both Macs and PCs. I wrote about my use of it many years ago. Most of what I wrote there is still true, so if you want to get my opinion of the overall app take a look at that old page.

Dantz foundered, earning a reputation for miserly customer support and increasingly buggy products. They never really adjusted to OS X; the code base was probably too old to fix and they'd deferred a rewrite for too long.

EMC bought Retrospect, and I figured that was the end. It was indeed the end for the Macintosh product line, it's not been updated in years and it's hard to believe it will be sold after 10.5 is released. I've discovered, however, that they have invested in EMC® Retrospect® Pro 7.5 for Windows.

I found this out because Retrospect Pro 6.5, which I've been reluctantly losing because there is still no alternative for automated backup of a mixed Windows/Mac LAN had become very unstable. It was failing with cryptic error messages, it's a few years old, and I was using it in an unsupported fashion (with clients released for newer server versions) -- there was no sense trying to fix it. I had to either upgrade or switch to individual machine backup - a thought too painful to consider.

I'd held off upgrading for years because Dantz releases were so buggy an "upgrade" only introduced new issues - and left the old issues unchanged. EMC looked worse at first -- no user forums, no trials, nothing. In the past six months or so, however, EMC reinstated user forums and, above all, provided 30 day trial versions of all their products. They'd done enough to deserve a look, they'd dropped the price (buy on Amazon), the upgrade price was reasonable, and I was desperate.

So I tried -- without first uninstalling Retrospect Pro 6.5 (mistake!). The first thing I got were error messages and log entries like this one:

OS: Windows XP version 5.1 (build 2600), Service Pack 2, (32 bit)
Application: C:\Program Files\Retrospect\Retrospect 7.5\retrorun.exe,
Exception occurred on 6/22/2007 at 10:56:33 AM
Exception code: c0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
Fault address: 004093c3 0001:000083c3 (null)

and like this:

• retrospect elem.cpp-993

I fumbled around a bit, thinking 7.5 was choking on my complex scripts, but I couldn't fix the problem. The fix was:

• uninstall Retrospect Pro 6.5
• reboot (because Retrospect does ugly things to low levels of the host OS)
• uninstall Retrospect Pro 7.5
• reboot
• heck, reboot again
• install Retrospect Pro 7.5
• reboot
• look for updates
• update and reboot

The 30 day trial then worked. I ran the backups for a week and did a few random file restores and there have been no errors, though I admit that the only Mac I backup now is a PPC Mac running OS X 10.4. I'll soon be adding in the Intel laptop and I'm reasonably sure I'll have problems -- I don't think EMC has many Mac resources left. I run the Windows software on an old XP machine I'll run until it dies and is replaced by a new Intel iMac and an XP VM.

So I bought the upgrade from Amazon, thinking I should get the physical media. The price was cheaper too I think. What you get is a CD - nothing else. No documentation of course, but I know this immensely complex and completely unfriendly software very well. (They've introduced "wizards" to try to make it friendlier, but I disabled those. I've no idea if they help.) The upgrade process is a bit odd, but despite hanging for a bit at one point it completed. What you get with the CD is an "activation code". You enter that on the right page, your old registration code, and your address information to get a new code, which you'd better not lose (it is emailed to you as well as shown online).

In summary, Retrospect Pro is still a very unfriendly and complex hunk of software, and the clients probably don't work properly with a modern Mac, but it's an improvement on recent versions and if you want to backup a mixed LAN affordably and automatically there are no other choices.

BTW, don't expect to be able to do a "bare metal" restore on OS X. That might be theoretically possible, but I've never heard of anyone doing it using Retrospect. This is all about backing up your personal data.

Google Maps - add content but where's my public content?

Google Maps Directory lets me select items to incorporate into "my map", where "my" is one of my Google identities. I like the distance measure, etc.

There are a few things I haven't figured out yet:

1. How do I find useful things to add? There are a lot of maplets, and they're ordered only by popularity. It doesn't look like I can search by zip (to find those relevant to a particular area) and there isn't enough metadata associated with the maplets to support search anyway. Google needs to provide more views and allow others to develop maplet collections.
2. How do the things I create show up on other people's maps? I can create pictures which show up on Google Earth, but they don't appear on Google Maps. Likewise the bicycle trails and other items I mark as "public" don't seem to be accessible either -- at least not yet.

I assume these will get sorted out soon. Google Maps are pretty darned exciting. They'll be even better when they're integrated with Public Google Calendar (so one can find events in both space and time and switch space/time views, pending Google's incorporation of four dimensional maps ....).