When themes corrupt: Fixing a possessed PowerPoint

Twenty minutes before show time, my PowerPoint 2007 presentation (Sorry kittens) was possessed. I tried adding a drawing item to an image and nothing happened. I couldn’t get the the image to display in the normal slide view. I couldn’t fix the problems, so I gave up and went with what I had.

Later I tried to figure out what went wrong. As best I can tell the themes/layout control data had been corrupted. This particular presentation started with a corporate theme as PPT 2003 and had round-tripped between 2003 and 2007 a few times.

Evidently, a few times too many.

Setting a theme on a slide didn’t fix it. The fix was

1. To to View – Presentation views – Slide Master
2. In this view, choose Themes and apply a theme
3. Save
4. Go back through presentation and fix everything up

I had to make do with a standard PPT 2007 theme, but I could again edit my presentation.

LiLi: Windows s/w to create a bootable Linux USB key

My sislaw used Linux Live USB Creator to create a Ubuntu USB key to boot her dead netbook. She pulled her drive data off after booting.

So now she doesn't need to use Gillware data recovery -- though she speaks highly of them.

No personal experience, but worth filing away.

Image Capture - Import to Aperture - deadly bug

I don't remember Image Capture having an "Import to Aperture" and "Import to iPhoto" feature:

Is it new in 10.6?

IC has several advantages over native import. With an iPhone, for example, you can browse your images and choose which to import, and which to delete. There's no other way to mass delete iPhone images on OS X.

Now you can do that during a directed import, no need to save first to the desktop.

Update: Sh*t. Don't do this. From my Apple Discussion post of a few moments ago:

Image Capture allows one to specify Aperture as a target.

Nice feature, but Aperture can't handle video.

So what happens when the images you choose to import contain a video, and you've set IC to delete after import?

The videos are deleted, but not imported. If you were to import directly to Aperture they would be saved to the desktop by Aperture, but with this route they are deleted.

Lethal bug.

I experimented with FileJuicer and PhotoRescue recovery apps. FileJuicer didn't find ANY AVI files, and it ignored the preference settings I used. PhotoRescue found several of interest, but there's no thumbnail -- I can't tell if they're intact or not. There's no longer a MBG for PhotoRescue, so it would be a real gamble to try. We might just live without the videos.

Really nasty bug.

Update b: I am geek. Hear me roar. I knew from watching the image capture process that the images had been copied somewhere. So I went looking.

Spotlight couldn't find them, but DevonThink EasyFind is not so limited. I searched on ".AVI" and found the videos in the hidden folder where ImageCapture stores files prior to sending them elsewhere.

/private/tmp/Image Capture_Import.z2G5f9sM

They were all there. Fortunately I thought of this before this cache was emptied.

I love EasyFind.

Google Reader - following vs. reading the feed

Mahendra, who I will now be following, has written a great summary on using Google Reader. It was all familiar to me, but he cleared up a mystery for me ..

How I Live and Breathe Google Reader by @ScepticGeek

... Tip: By adding a person’s shared items to a folder in Reader, you can unfollow the person in Buzz if you wish, while continuing to see their Reader shares....

Aha! That explains it. Some of the people I most like to follow, like John Munro, had vanished from my Google Reader "Follow" section but their shared item feed remained in my GR Subscription section. I bet I accidentally clicked "unfollow" (surprisingly easy to do for me).

I just navigated to John's shared item feed as shown in GR and added him back to my follow section. (Oops! He's showing up as "08915834275668816438". Hope this gets fixed soon.)

Like Mahendra I'm abstaining from Buzz. Google Reader "People you follow" is much closer to what I want than Buzz.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

FCC iPhone speed tester: very slow upload in MSP

I tried the FCC iPhone Broadband speed app today.

I ran it once on WiFi and once on MSP 3G.

Houshold DSL speed: 5.5 mbps down, .75 mbps up

iPhone WiFi: 5.8 mpbs down, 0.71 mpbs up

iPhone 3G: 2 mpbs down, 0.08 mpbs up

The iPhone WiFi performance was limited by our home DSL speeds.

The 3G download performance was pretty good. The 3G upload performance, however, was really bad. It's comparable to a modem. AT&T's 3G upload is 4% of download performance. No wonder posting images to Facebook, or to Evernote, is so slow.

OS X Backup: Apple's Backup 3.x

[Update: This post has several updates, but in the end I rejected Backup 3 due to an unacceptable bug.]

I've been trying to figure out how to manage offsite backup now that Retrospect is a lost cause.

I'm using Time Machine/Time Capsule for onsite backup for all of our machines, and testing SuperDuper for an offsite backup of my main machine using an encrypted disk image to work around SDs lack of encryption. That leaves my laptop. Alas, OS X won't mount a networked encrypted sparsebundle image for SuperDuper to use, and I can't backup up my laptop data without encryption.

I can, however, backup just my key laptop iPhoto library to a share.

How to do that?

Well, turns out Apple Backup 3 still works - at least with Leopard. The current version is 3.1.2. Apple will update old versions, and if you're a current MobileMe subscriber it's still available. Free.

Might be just what I need for stuff that doesn't need encryption.

Testing now.

See also:

• Time Machine, Time Capsule and offsite backup
• Online backup – the security problem (it’s not the encryption)
• CrashPlan (or JungleDisk) instead of Retrospect 8?
• Freeing up Time Capsule space – and documentation for Time Machine and Time Capsule

Update 4/1/2010: I've now combined scheduled Backup with traveling. Yech. It's stuck on a backup schedule I can't edit and it can't complete. This app never got past beta testing.

Update 4/13/10: APPLE SAYS DON'T USE BACKUP. It doesn't really work with 10.5 or later. Thanks, Apple.

Update 4/14/10: Ok, now they release Backup 3.2. I'm getting whiplash here! Also, I came up with a workaround for the lack of encryption. I use Backup.app to put a backup of my iPhoto Library on my primary drive, that entire drive is backed up by SuperDuper to a local (USB drive) sparsebundle encrypted disk image. This means my current iPhoto library ends up with two local time machine backups, one local backup on my primary server, one local backup via SuperDuper on an external drive, and one remote backup. Five backups feels about right.

The major 3.2 change, besides presumed compatibility with 10.5 and beyond, is recycling. Most significantly, it "improves" restore reliability (kind of scary actually).

Update 4/17/10: I've given up on Backup. I believe it can cause an endless SPOD (spinning pizza of death) system hang when it's backing up to a network share and connectivity is lost (ex: laptop goes to sleep, hang on resume). That's an unacceptable bug.

Can't mount sparsebundle disk images over an AFP network

I can mount several types of OS X disk images from an AFP (TCP/IP) network share, or even from an iDisk (slow obviously), but not sparsebundle encrypted disk images. I can only mount those from a local drive.

This to be a limitation of both 10.5 and 10.6 (Leopard and Snow Leopard). I found a related Apple Discussion thread and an older 10.5 thread on NAS mounting.

I was trying to do this as a workaround for SuperDuper not supporting drive encryption. I had hoped to first backup locally to a sparsebundle encrypted image, then move the image to a shared drive which I hoped to then update over the WLAN. That way I could safely rotate my SD backups offsite.

This doesn't work. We really need SD to support encryption.