Saturday, February 20, 2010
Series of 10.6 bugs related to erasing (formatting) an external drive
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
Google Buzz, Chat and Reader - together at last. Farewell Twitter.
The Buzz shared items are the sum of Chat status messages, Google reader shared items and Picasa image shares:
Your Google Reader shared items, Picasa Web public albums, and Google Chat status messages will automatically appear as posts in Buzz. To edit your connected sites or change privacy settings, view connected sites."Connected sites" create posts in Buzz. Mine started out with Picasa public albums and Google Reader shared items. It's not, however, showing my Chat status messages as a "connected site" so there's something funny there. Those should really show as "connected sites". [I don't think Chat updates are doing anything at the moment].
I think that Buzz is the gathering point and Buzz posts don't go to Google Reader shared items or to Chat status, but really it's hard to tell. The site is semi-stable at the moment.
I've never had much use for Twitter, and it looks like I'll have even less use in the future - especially if Google ties this into SMS.
Saturday, February 06, 2010
OS X Address Book: How do you show all groups for a Contact?
InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed - Address Book: "the group setup window should appear,"I don't believe there's a group setup window any more. It's easy to add an address to a group, but I don't think there's away to inspect or interact with an address and find out which groups it belongs to.
Select a contact in the Name column.
Hold down the Option key.
Address Book highlights the groups the contact belongs to in the Groups column. If you have a lot of groups, scroll the list to see all of the highlighted groups.
Sync heck: CalDAV vs Exchange Server - a Google Apple review
- CalDAV to multiple Google Calendars, including my wife's family calendar, my personal calendar, and various school and sport and social calendars all shared via Google. (iCal also subscribes to these. It's useful when I want to see the most data, but it's not essential.)
- MobileMe for Personal Contacts. MobileMe manages Contacts sync for me across multiple OS X machines.
- Microsoft's "Exchange" (ActiveSync) for my corporate Contacts, Calendar and email.
- Gmail for my personal mail.
- On my iPhone I can't move an appointment between calendars after I've created it
- Exception handling is quirky. I can set an appointment in Google to workweek only, but it may not stay that way on my iPhone.
- I can't invite people to appointments created on the iPhone CalDAV account, even though Google supports invitations. I can do invites with the ActiveSync account.
- iPhone sync to Google contacts - 3 methods and work/home implications
- Project Contacts: Now mixing Outlook/Exchange, PST file, Outlook/Home, MobileMe Sync, OS X Address Book and the iPhone.
- Using OS X 10.5 iCal with Google CalDAV - cleaning up import disasters
- Address book sharing with OS X and MobileMe
- Project Contacts: Integration across iPhone, Google and whatever
- Work home contact integration: Outlook to Google to OS X Address Book
- MobileMe: Integrating Work and Personal Contacts
Friday, February 05, 2010
Access denied: VMWare Shared Folders on Windows 7
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup
Time Machine, among its other significant weaknesses, is ill suited to offsite backup – especially when it is used with Time Capsule.
If you attach an external drive to Time Capsule there is an “archive feature” that will shut down TC access and safely transfer the data to an external drive. Problem is, neither the drive nor the backup are encrypted.
Carrying around non-encrypted backups is not a good idea.
There’s a similar problem with a standard Time Machine external drive. If you swap them, you run into the same encryption problem.
The answer for an external drive is to use an encrypted disk image and mount that for TM backups. That doesn’t, however, work with standard Time Capsule archive behavior. I suspect one might be able to disconnect all clients and use the finder to copy the disk images to an encrypted disk image, but I’ve not tested that.
See also:
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Time Machine - Unable to Complete Backup bug on Time Capsule
This doesn't work for Time Capsule though. TC won't let you delete the inProgress file. I couldn't find any report of a fix, save dragging the actual machine specific TC sparse disk image to the trash and starting over. (The official response to all similar problems, by the way, is to wipe the entire TC disk and redo ALL machine backups).
What worked for me was to turn off Time Machine on all the TC clients. Then I restarted the AirPort and then turned TM back on for the troubled machine. The backup chugged away for a while, and then it resumed.
See also:
- Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule
- Fixing the Time Machine / Time Capsule 10.5 "Backup volume could not be mounted" bug