My MacBook fan was roaring. Again. Time Capsule edition.

My MacBook fan was roaring. Again.

This time, however, activity monitor didn't show much going on. It wasn't a Flash ad running in another user account. I didn't have a print job stuck in the bowels of Apple's dysfunctional printing framework.

It had been doing it for weeks. Sluggish performance, slow fan pinup, then continuous running. Something was draining performance and making heat -- and it wasn't showing up in Activity Monitor.

Or, at least, it wasn't obvious in Activity Monitor. I did see something called fsck_hfs using up 10% or so CPU.

To make a long story short - the problem was a defective Time Capsule backup. My MacBook was running fsck_hfs, a utility that "verifies and repairs standard HFS and HFS+ file systems". When I saw this I thought there was something wrong with my system drive - but it tested out fine.

A SuperUser tip clued me in. My MacBook was trying to verify the integrity of my 150GB backup -- over a WiFi connection. This is a singularly ineffective strategy, it would have taken days to complete. The laptop never ran continuously for that long; and there is something about this process that makes a MacBook run hot [3]

If I'd known what to look [1] for I'd have seen something like this:

Except it would have shown 2-4%. It only got to 92% when I connected the laptop to my TC via wired ethernet. It got to 92% then stuck there. The backup was toast.

I then disconnected all users and tried deleting the .img file for my MacBook from TC. That failed because the Finder can't handle TB scale image files [2]. I then used AirPort Utility's very confusing Time Capsule UI to erase the entire drive and started the slow, painful, recreation of my backups.

My MacBook is quiet and responsive again, and fsck_hfs free.

That was painful.

Backup is an unsolved problem.

See also:

• My MacBook fan was roaring. Why? 5/2008.
• Obnoxious old Epson Scan bug: EPSON Scan cannot be started 2/2008
• OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox 9/2008.
• When Safari locks up - Kill Flash process
• iMac G5: fans running more often 10/2006
• osx - Why has my Mac been running fsck_hfs for two days now? - Super User - great discussion of this problem
• Time Machine. Backup failed with error...: Apple Support Communities 9/2008

[1] I wasn't so direct, instead I wandered about searching Console error messages. There I found:

search console for com.apple.backupd (all messages)

Attempting to mount network destination using URL: afp://;AUTH=No%20User%20Authent@Molly.local/Molly_Internal

Backup failed with error: 21

Error writing Time Machine Information file: /Volumes/Molly_Internal/Stanford_MacBook_0017f2f04828.sparsebundle/com.apple.TimeMachine.MachineID.plist

Error writing to backup log. NSFileHandleOperationException:*** -[NSConcreteFileHandle writeData:]: Input/output error

Event store UUIDs don't match for volume: Escanaba

While plumbing Console I discovered an unrelated error that distracted me for a while - a pile of errors like this:

Jul 20 18:27:55 localhost com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.SystemStarter): Failed to count the number of files in "/System/Library/StartupItems": No such file or directory

Googling on this one I discovered this is an old OS X bug, one some systems a routine update deleted this folder. I recreated it using terminal:

cd /System/Library

sudo mkdir StartupItems

That cleared up a bunch of Console error messages, but it didn't fix my real problem.

[2] Kind of amazing, but there you go. Apparently they can be deleted via terminal, but erasing through TC is safer. You can only erase the internal drive, if you want to erase a TC mounted external drive you need to move it to a Mac and erase it there.

[3] The MacBook runs hot whenever it does an 802.11n TC backup. I wonder how much of this is heat output from the WiFi/encryption systems.

Organizing kid school accounts with OS X: Chrome to the rescue

In the twilight of the general purpose computer, I struggle to balance OS X and Apple tech, Google services, parental obligations, and getting work done.

Our iOS  and OS X devices are parental controlled -- at least as far as they can be. Among other things, that means Google services are unavailable on child accounts. [1].

Schools, however, make increasing use of Google Apps [2]. This is how I reconcile that use case with our general approach to home computing:

1. You need the username and password for the school Google Apps account. Example: kid_name@school.mn.us.
2. Create a single non-controlled "homework" account on the primary homework machine.
3. Use Google Chrome, not Safari, for this account.
4. In Chrome create a user account for each child. For each account, from Chrome Preferences, choose to sync Google. You will be asked for the school user name and password.
5. Add gmail, docs and so on to the toolbar.

Each child uses this single OS X account with their own Chrome identity. Use of this account requires direct parental supervision. It is used only for homework. On personal OS X accounts our kids don't directly access our Family Google Apps domain, they use OS X Mail.app, for example, to get email. They don't know their Family Google Apps passwords.

[1] Partly by design and partly due to market disinterest, Google services are not compatible with OS Parental Controls.
[2] Alas, this transition occurred even as Google's Hyde crushed its Jeckyl.

OS X shared printing: Is it just me?

Is it just me, or is OS X shared printing broken beyond all repair?

I spend an inordinate amount of time dealing with print failures on Leopard and/or Snow Leopard shared Brother USB printers using Apple provided drivers. The only reliable printing I've had with OS X was with an ethernet connected network printer. [1]

Yet another example of why general purpose computers are dying (and I've a lot more to say on that ... later).

[1] The very best, most reliable, printing I ever experienced was using Mac Classic, AppleTalk, and Apple's LaserWriter Select (not sure of product name) in the early 1990s. I'm planning to donate our Brother HL-2140 and buy a Brother networked printer.

Lessons from Apple Store out-of-warranty repair of a Seagate drive

Mysterious application crashes, including corruption of Aperture file data, exposed bad blocks on a slowly dying 2 yo iMac drive. Modern drives aren't supposed to show their bad blocks, and of course they should never corrupt a file. So I knew the drive needed to be replaced.

The 27" iMac 11 (i5) is not user-serviceable. It can be done, but it's hard to keep dust out of the display. So I compared repair costs at FirstTech in Minneapolis to the Roseville MN Apple store. FirstTech's service costs were about $200, but Apple's service fee is a flat $40 (offsets the high cost of their proprietary designs). Both charge far more than retail for a hard drive. Apple dinged me $226 to replace a 1TB Seagate 7200.12.

The replacement drive is an ST31000528ASQ revision AP24 S/N 5VP9Z4TC. I was told it had a 90 day warranty. A comparable new drive from Amazon is $134, so Apple adds a $100 markup on the drive. (Of course I'd have preferred a 2TB replacement, but Apple out-of-warranty repairs follow warranty rules -- so no upgrades.)

Overall the Roseville MN Apple store experience was mediocre. Some of this is because of Apple policies, but mostly this store is bursting at the seams at this time of year. Apple needs more retail.

If I were to do it again I'd order replacement parts from a quality Mac after-market vendor and I'd do the repair myself, or I'd order the part and pay FirstTech to do it. When an out-of-warranty Apple repair makes sense, I'd look for a quieter Apple store.

Here's what I learned for future reference:

• Apple wanted to keep my old drive. They can probably get money from Seagate. This was a problem because I hadn't secure-wiped the drive, and although my passwords are on an encrypted image I prefer not to have our family data floating around. I also wanted to reformat and stress test it myself, and decide if I could use it as an emergency store. Store management wrote that "I needed the drive for data recovery" and that let me keep it. (Not true - I had 2+ complete backups.)
• I thought I was told the drive would cost about $160, but in retrospect that was probably my mistake. $160 would be low markup. In any case, get estimates in writing if possible.
• When I went for an estimate I was told to expect a 3 day turnaround. In fact it took about 9 calendar days -- including 3 days to repeat the drive test and confirm the bad blocks. It took so long it ran into a business trip; the store was grumpy about storing it until I returned.
• They expect to have a guest or maintenance account available for testing. I had none on this machine. They were able to test anyway of course, but this is worth knowing.
• The machine had additional memory added, but the repair receipt listed the original memory. This was mildly worrisome but it came back with its bits.
• The installed drive was formatted with the same OS as the old one - Snow Leopard.

I tested the drive with Tech Tools Pro. The SMART check on the prior drive showed no problems except out-of-range temperature variation. The SMART check on the new drive also shows out-of-range temperature variation! I hope this is a quirk of TTP and the iMac's thermal regulation system rather than a drive problem. The block scan passed 1,953,525,168 blocks, 0 bad. (Although no bad blocks should ever be exposed, the good block total will fall over time.) The overall SMART test also shows a tendency to read errors, though still within normal limits (Hardware ECC recovered, Raw Read Error Rate).

Lastly, I chose to do my restore from a bootable Carbon Copy Cloner backup rather than my Time Capsule backup (I trust CCC more). I'd never done a full clone restore on a Mac; it worked well but there were a few quirks...

• During my initial testing I'd created a user account on the new disk. The default CCC restore would have left those files in place -- which is an abnormal install state. Also, the default restore seems to leave "more recent" files untouched, which might produce a mixed version system.
• I set the restore to overwrite "more recent" files and to move non-matches to an archive folder.
• After the install completed I deleted CCC_archive on the target system
• After the restore it appears TC is backing up my entire system. That will take a week over the home wireless.

For extra insurance I'm going to leave my CCC backup untouched and rotate it offsite. My routine backups will be to an older CCC backup and to Time Capsule. In my initial testing however the restored data appears fine. I also have my original drive which is fully readable, I'll wait a month or so before I wipe that drive and stress test it.

Update: Time Capsule is trying to backup 340GB over WiFi; it's doing a full backup. This will take weeks. I've set my TC backup to omit all but Users, tomorrow I'll bring it to the computer and connect by ethernet.

Lion continues to disappoint: the Duplicate/Save problem

I have a document open in Pages.

It's saved somewhere.

What is its name? Where has it been saved? If I "Duplicate", how do I find the "Duplicate"? What is the name of the "Duplicate"?

Apple's change to Lion's file management behavior is a significant hassle. Macintouch has a detailed list of complaints from numerous Lion victims.

It's worse than a hassle though. It's a scary sign of incompetence. If Apple's developers are capable of this level of judgment failure, what else might they do?

Lion to Vista comparisons are well deserved. I may keep Snow Leopard on our household machines indefinitely, which means I won't be doing much with iCloud. It also means I'll delay upgrading our hardware as long as possible.

See also:

• Lion as a sign of post-Jobs Apple
• My Lion bugs - collection
• Lion: Only 3.5 stars on Apple's App Store
• Lion server is even worse

Update 1/24/12: Inside Apple explains why Lion is a troubled product ...

... status fluctuates with the prominence of the products on which one works. As the success of the iPhone and iPad grew, the coolest faction of the company was the software engineers working on Apple's mobile operating system software, known as iOS. Hardware engineers and product marketers connected with the devices ranked high in the pecking order, followed by people in the iTunes, iCloud, and other online services organizations. Employees associated primarily with the Macintosh, once the cocks of the roost, were considered second-rate in the Apple hierarchy by this time. In terms of corporate coolness, functions such as sales, human resources, and customer service wouldn't even rate...

It feels like the province of interns now. Imagine who gets to work on iPhoto ...

NYT's Tedeschi misses the iOS Porn story

Sadly, Bob Tedeschi, who should know better, missed the big story in his NYT article on Porn and iOS parental controls.

When he wrote that it was "an hour's work" to secure an iOS device I almost snorted coffee out my nose.

This is the article I wrote him:

re: Safeguarding a Child’s Mobile Device From Pornography

Bob, I'm surprised you missed the truck-sized loophole in Apple's iOS Parental Controls. Alas, by missing it you came to precisely the wrong conclusion.

It is not 1 hour's work to secure an iOS device. It is almost impossible.

The loophole is embedded WebKit. Disabling Safari does not disable WebKit.

Almost all free Apps, and many commercial apps, include links that will, when clicked, bring up an embedded WebKit browser. From that browser it is often only a few clicks to anything.

For example, my 15yo showed me how he could use the links on this travel app to bring up wikipedia, and from there Google.

Almost all iAds, and all Google platform ads, use Webkit.

This problem is common in apps that are rated for children.

The solution is simple. Apple should provide an option to block Webkit use as well as Safari use. They haven't done this because they aren't feeling any pressure, and their ad platform is already doing poorly.

I am sorry you missed a golden opportunity to put some pressure on Apple, but I hope in a follow-up article you might mention this.

You can write him too.

Update: I was amazed and impressed to get a personal response to my email - on a Sunday night! He's verified the issue and is now researching it. Wow. I am a fan.

iPhoto 9.2.1 to Aperture 3.2.1 - it doesn't actually work

Apple promotes Aperture's seamless import of iPhoto content.

I've been skeptical, but I gave it a try on a plane flight. I added 21 images to a brand new iPhoto 9.2.1 Library and I created albums and events. I then gave descriptions to images and to both albums and events. Then I imported the images into Aperture.

The iPhoto.Events became Aperture.Projects. The iPhoto.Albums became Aperture.Albums. iPhoto.Folders became Aperture.Folders.

Eventually. At first the iPhoto.Albums were missing. They showed up minutes later on reopening Aperture. This took so long it feels like a bug.

Image metadata seems to have been preserved - titles, captions, etc. I've written about this previously for iPhoto, Aperture and Picasa Web Albums.

That's the end of the good news. All of the descriptions I added to Albums/Events were lost. Aperture Projects/Albums can't have annotations. So that description you wrote in iPhoto about the family reunion? It's toast.

Aperture's iPhoto import is feeble - and Apple's marketing of Aperture's iPhoto import is deceptive.

Apple does stuff like this though. I'm not surprised they did a crappy job on iPhoto import.

What's truly weird however, is that nobody besides me seems to care. That means Apple isn't going to fix this.

There are times when I know I live in the Twilight Zone. This is one of those times.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Lessons in Software: Aperture 3 and iPhoto 11 10/2010
• iPhoto '08: don't embed metadata in JPEG originals 12/2007
• Stuck in Apple's photo management Limbo 5/2011 - still stuck today
• Apple Aperture: iPhoto replacement?: 10/2005 - seven years later, it's still not a full replacement
• Migration of metadata from Aperture to iPhoto and Google's Picasa web albums