Killjoy review: I so wanted to like the T1i

Amazon reviews can be so cruel.

I really wanted to get a Canon EOS Rebel T1i this summer, but the Amazon reviews are a buzzkill. Like this one.

Too many megapixels. Damn. If only they'd gone for more light sensitivity and 10 megapixels.

PS. I rarely bother with the 4-5 star reviews. The best reviews are always in the 2-3 star range.

Snow Leopard 10.6.3: still not ready for primetime

Apple is having a very hard time getting rid of the really big 10.6 bugs (emphases mine) ...

Macintouch - Snow Leopard: Updates - Matt Neuburg

... Applied the 10.6.3 combo updater to two computers. No issues on either ...

One minor annoyance: I noticed on both computers that my display's custom ColorSync profile setting had been forgotten. I had to go into System Preferences - Displays - Color and select the correct profile.

Please see also the report concerning the three Snow Leopard bugs originally identified and reported in TidBITS. Two of them are fixed by this release (great, that only took 7 months), but one, a serious bug where attempting to Finder-copy a file bundle via File Sharing, is not fixed. http://db.tidbits.com/article/11123"

The Tidbits article link reports fixes to an Apple events bug and a Preview bug.

I still can' recommend upgrading to 10.6 from a happy 10.5 machine. At this rate, it won't be respectable before 10.6.5. Apple is struggling to keep all their balls in the air.

There's been no mention of a fix for the USB/firewire external drive system lockup bug.

See also:

• Image Capture - Import to Aperture - deadly bug
• The OS X Snow Leopard "Connected As" MobileMe bug
• Why you shouldn't use OS X ACLs
• My 10.6 iMac is crashing - a debugging exercise

Virgin mobile - Sprint for your laptop, no contract

For $100 it appears you can sign up for Virgin Mobile Broadband Service. From the fine print it looks like they're reselling Sprint, but there's no contract, you pay on demand ...

$10 10 Days 100 MB 5 hrs Web Browsing Or 25 minutes
Video Or 10,000 Emails (without attachment)
$20 30 Days 300 MB 15 hrs Web Browsing Or 1 hour Video
Or 25,000 Emails (without attachment)
$40 30 Days 1 GB 50 hrs Web Browsing Or 4 hours
Video Or 100,000 Emails (without attachment)
$60 30 Days 5 GB* 250 hrs Web Browsing Or 21 hours Video
Or 500,000 Emails (without attachment)

I'm interested. Anyone with any customer experience?
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My slowing 3G iPhone -- and why multitasking will need new hardware

My 3G iPhone feels like it's on its last legs. Rebooting only helps a bit.

Why should it feel so much slower now than the day I bought it?

Perhaps because it's constantly processing two email accounts, two calendars, one file share, and two contacts servers including use of CalDAV, Exchange server, and MobileMe protocols. That's atop whatever else I might be doing with the phone.

My 3G iPhone is doing a lot of multitasking, and it's hurting. It doesn't have the firepower to handle these demands.

Emily's 3GS does a lot better, but if Apple were to enable 3rd party multitasking I suspect it would run out of steam too.

I'm guessing we'll get 3rd party multitasking on the iPhone this year, probably requiring special certification by Apple, but that it will only be enabled on the June 2010 phone. More multitasking will require new hardware.
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Amazon MP3 download in Safari

I bought an MP3 tune from Amazon, but the download wouldn't work.

Safari OS X kept saving a ".amz" file. The instructions said to "open it", but of course Safari refused. The "help" link took me to a Windows specific help page.

The real answer is that you must first Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader. The downloader is supposed to require that, but it didn't in my case. I migrated my account from a machine that had the downloader installed, so that might explain the bug.

I do wonder, however, how many OS X users ever buy from Amazon. I'm guessing it's a very low number.

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.