Bloggers label (category) feeds (and Yahoo Pipes is still around)

I decided today to start writing more about ways to use Apple’s defunct Aperture photo management app. I’ll be using it for years while I wait for Photos.app to mature, and I know it’s not going to change much.

Writing that post I wondered again if Blogger supported feeds on tags (“Labels”). I thought they did; sure enough I wrote about this feature four years ago…

Gordon's Tech: Using Bloggers undocumented label (category) feeds and Yahoo Pipes to create a tech opinion feed out of Gordon's Notes

… To start with, here's the label for "technology"

http://notes.kateva.org/search/label/technology

and here's the feed (Atom) following the above pattern

http://notes.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/technology

The only new development in the past four years is that this is now an official feature. Unfortunately the Feeds still don’t get a useful name.

I wrote about Yahoo Pipes in the same blog post; Pipes was the IFTTT of its day (but far more ambitious). Turns out Pipes is still around; things that are useful but abandoned tend to be stable and cheap to maintain (last Twitter post was 7/2013 though — I wouldn’t build a mission critical operation on Pipes).

Aperture Tips: Introduction to a series of posts

As we all know Aperture has been “sunset”. We think that sometime in 2015 Apple will “ship” something called Photos.app for OS X. It will be a partial regression from iPhoto; it may have some interesting new features.

Assuming Apple gets its decrepit application software division into working order we might get a viable Aperture 3.5x replacement based on an advanced version of Photos.app  sometime in 2018 [1]. We don’t know if Apple will continue to ship Digital RAW compatibility Updates, but we received a Mavericks update just two weeks ago. It’s not inconceivable that Apple will provide Aperture 3.5 compatible RAW updates through 2016. (Aperture is still being sold, and even Apple is likely to provide updates for 1-2 years following end of sale.)

Since there’s no exit from Aperture (or iPhoto) [3] this means I’m expecting to use Aperture for another 4 years. During that time I’ll be still be learning new techniques and workarounds; Aperture is an awesomely power application [2], even if it is now years behind the cutting edge of image processing. In the worst case scenario I’ll buy Lightroom for RAW image development then drop output files into Aperture [4].

I don’t expect Aperture books and web sites to last long though, so I’m planning to put together my own series of tips and tricks based on what I read elsewhere on the web and on a book I’ve just bought. I’ll be going the archives of some old Aperture blogs like:

• The Aperture Blog
• The Photos Expert (formerly ApertureExpert) - it does have feeds, it’s only feed discovery that’s inexplicably broken [5]
• Apple - Aperture - Resources still around
• Aperture 3: The Digital Story

The tips will show up in the Aperture Tag, you can even use a label feed: http://tech.kateva.org/feeds/posts/default/-/Aperture.

- fn -

[1] Based on how long it took Apple to produce a healthy version of Aperture in the first place.

[2] And it’s no longer terribly buggy. The main Aperture bug I run into now is the dangerous Empty Project / Empty Album bug. It’s not that frequent, but  beware deleting Projects that show no images!

[3] Strong data lock. Migration to Lightroom was once laughable, but see Aperture Exporter.

[4] Remember JPEG 2000? Or Windows Media Photo / HD Photo / JPEG XR? DNG (TIFF+XMP metadata)? I might go for DNG assuming I can make Lightroom output TIFF DMG per Aperture’s expectations. Good reference here, note the LOC and several other institutions favor JPEG 2000.

[5] I missed the transition to the new blog! I have to add the current one to Feedbin.

See also

• Aperture Exporter: impressive toolset to facilitate migration or save archive creation. Option to create XMPP side cards for JPEG.
• Gordon’s Tech: Dealing with Time Zones in Aperture across multiple cameras - what I do for now 5/2014
• Gordon’s Notes: Apple kills yet another photo sharing service - and generally screws up iOS photo management 9/2014. Amazing.

Yosemite features that are at least mildly interesting

Yosemite’s reputation in the Mac geek community seems to be somewhere between Lion and Mavericks — well behind Snow Leopard. So I’m happy waiting for at least two more point releases — probably summery 2015.

This is particularly easy because there are so few things in Yosemite that interest me.

There’s a downside though — by the time I get to Yosemite nobody will be talking about interesting features. So I’m creating this blog post to keep track of the things I am (mildly) looking forward to using. I’ll update it over time.

Super-advanced tips for Mac OS X Yosemite (UPDATED) - How to - Macworld UK

35 “super-advanced tips”, and maybe two are interesting (for me). Some of the more interesting tips are about disabling Yosemite features.

… Turn tags into stacks

Stacks are the special folders at the right of the Dock that spring up when clicked. It’s always been possible to drag your own folders down there to create your own stacks, but in Yosemite this feature is extended to tags – the color-coding system introduced with the previous version of OS X that lets you organise files.

Just drag a tag from where they’re listed in the sidebar of a Finder window to the right-hand side of the dock near the Trash. A space should open up for you to drop the icon, and clicking on that stack in future will show only files or folders that use that particular tag….

…. If you search for something using the new Spotlight in Yosemite, a folder may be shown in the list of results.

What’s not obvious is that you can use the cursor keys to highlight this folder, then tap the Tab key to move the highlight over to the right of the window so that you can select an item within it.

Hitting Enter will open any highlighted entry. Tapping Shift+Tab will move the highlight back to the left-hand column….

… Turning off making/receiving phone calls can be done by opening FaceTime on your Mac, opening the Preferences dialog box (Cmd+,), and removing the tick alongside IPhone Cellular Calls. Turning off text messaging must be done on the iPhone.

Open the Settings app, then tap the Messages heading. Tap the Text Message Forwarding heading, and tap the switch alongside the name of your computer….

and

50 OS X Yosemite Tips & Tricks | Mac|Life

… Markup will instantly recognize what you're trying to draw, whether it's a lopsided circle or crooked arrow. To use it, click the menu button that appears in the top-right of the attachment when you mouse over it…

… Rename a Group of Files …highlight your files, right-click and select the “rename items” options in the contextual menu. Then select “format” in the dropdown to apply a neat new nomenclature to the whole list...

… Activity Monitor … A new tab in Activity Monitor will show you exactly how much compressed memory is being utilized so you can kill any apps that are dragging your system down. Also useful is the new column within the Energy tab that shows any apps that are preventing your Mac from going to sleep…

and 

Apple - OS X Yosemite - See everything the new OS X can do

• iBook reading via VoiceOver much better 
• Some Automator improvements, unclear how well JavaScript OSA will work
• You can now drag a tag from the Finder sidebar to the Dock for quick access to all the files with that tag.[Apple actually mentions this!]
• Mail: The Markup toolbar makes it simple to add text and shapes to images and PDFs. You can even use your trackpad to draw shapes, and Markup will intelligently tidy them up.
• When you are iMessaging with someone, you can now start a screen sharing session from Messages.
• Find Friends in OS X Messages: If your friends have shared their locations using their iPhone, you can follow them in Messages on your Mac. [What the heck does this mean?]
• Preview: “You can use your trackpad to draw shapes, and Preview will intelligently tidy them up.: [The Newton did this.]
• … f there is a book related to your search, Spotlight will show you results from iBooks along with a description… [Does this work for ePUB in file system?]
• You can choose to have OS X updates installed automatically after they have been downloaded. 

Dang, but that’s a pretty short list of worthwhile features. Against it, a list of things that have been removed (much harder to find):

• Image Capture iOS delete function is gone.
• Preview PDF handling has had some regressions

Not to mention longstanding issues that are still unfixed.

Yosemite is the least interesting OS X upgrade I can recall.

 

iOS 8.1.1 iTunes sync bug - 'Show All Music' needed to see Music downloaded to device

I’ve seen this bug on my daughter’s (new) 4s. Even by the standards of Apple 2014 it is a good one.

All of her downloaded music disappeared. I turned on ‘Show All Music’ in Music.app settings and it reappeared — even thought it was physically on device.

iOS 8.1.1 and iTunes 12.x have some pretty impressive sync bugs (in addition to hiding hardware issues that impact sync).

It’s too late for me to avoid this iOS/iTunes pair, but I’m happy to be staying on Mavericks. I’ll look at Yosemite in the spring of 2015.

Apple has about $165 billion in cash reserves. You can buy a lot of software testing for just 1% of that. Just saying.

Move your Apple product records from one Apple ID to another Apple ID

Apple’s ID management has been a bit of a thrash. Many of us have multiple Apple IDs — I have four that I know of (Find Your Apple ID couldn’t locate any of them). My purchases are currently distributed between two Apple IDs - one that I use for all iTunes and one that has most, but not all, of my hardware purchases.

Today I figured out how to transfer devices between two Apple IDs. It’s fairly simple. Go to your support profile and log into the Apple ID you wish to remove the product from, remove it, log into the destination Apple ID, then add it.

For example:

1. Remove from 1st profile (this is an old device, useful for test purposes)

2. Add to 2nd profile (Apple ID)

3. Voila

Unfortunately it would be really tedious to unite all my hardware with my iTunes Apple ID, but at least I can move the two devices on the iTunes Apple ID to another one. They’ll all be in one place — but I’ll only move things that are out of warranty lest I mess up warranty records.

I have a feeling that the initial assignment is based on a flawed matching algorithm that uses things like credit card phone and address information.

iTunes sync problem: Internet Audio Stream, the Duplicate tune bug and Playlist Voodoo

Rob Griffiths is the kind of Mac geek who gets tech support from Tim Cook, and even he is struggling to keep iTunes sync working. The list of presumed bugs and magical workarounds for sync failures and Metastatic Other (CloudAssets cache bug), continues to grow, though no fix has been quite as exotic as my restoring from iCloud when restore from iTunes failed or @gaelicwizard’s suggestion to sync from a foreign computer to fully reset sync.

I see all of the problems Rob sees — and more. I really do miss the reliable days of iPod synchronization to iTunes. [1] 

There’s rumor of some sync fixes coming, but what I’d mostly like to see is error logging in Console. At least then we’d have a fighting chance at debugging this kludged mix of Cloud, USB, OS X and iOS.

Today’s problem was failure to sync my daughter’s music to her often troublesome 4s. I tried all the usual incantations including a “restore” (wipe) and restore from backup [2], and as usual nothing worked. iTunes sync swallowed its errors as it always did, and I saw long lists of dashed circle icons next to her phone music list (means sync failed).

Given Rob’s article I looked for dupes and I found an odd set in the music library:

Internet audio stream dupes?! That’s another bug, they aren’t supposed to show in Music — they’re “radio stations”. I deleted them, but it didn’t help.

What worked was kind of odd — I think the Wipe/Restore helped a bit with this, but it wasn’t enough by itself. I walked through iTunes long music screen, removing all the albums, playlists, manually added tunes and so on. Lots of clicks, but I didn’t uncheck music sync. Eventually I got all the music off the iPhone. Then I created Playlists and consolidated them with another “union” playlist that merged every playlist. Then I set that, and only that, playlist to sync. It worked … almost. Of 433 songs in the consolidated playlist, 432 actually show up on the iPhone. Turns out one of them is “Explicit” so was blocked, it shows as “dotted”.

I think this phone has some Flash problems, but maybe the single playlist sync source helped workaround what sounds like some nasty bugs with reconciling duplicates. Or, more likely, it’s all voodoo [2].

Update 11/26/2014

It’s dead Jim.

I thought maybe I’d gotten a bit more life out of this incredibly problematic phone, but my daughter reported that much of the music on the phone wouldn’t actually play. Music.app skipped the piece.

I had another 4s a friend just gave us. I wiped that one, restored by daughter’s last backup to it, and it works perfectly.

This phone is done. I assume the Flash is widely defective.

I’ve set up a service repair by mail — I don’t have time to trek over to the Apple store (not to mention I tried that 6-12 months ago and the phone passed testing). If Apple can’t find out what’s wrong I’ll give it to charity and take the tax break (I couldn’t inflict this thing on anybody else).

See also:

• iPhone with sync error: restore from iCloud fixed when restore from iTunes failed 7/2014
• iOS 7.1 movies (video) sync from iCloud but not iTunes - a bug and a fix 4/2014

[1] Synchronization is Hell. Gotta admit though — Calendars5.app/Google Calendar and Contacts.app/iCloud still mostly work, Toodledo/Todo is very reliable, and Simplenote/AltNV hangs on by its wee finger nails. [2] I wonder if the voodoo depends on whether the phone stalls out on a bad bit of memory. We need those missing Console diagnostics. 

Time Capsule fails again -- and Mavericks has the old OS X sparsebundle delete bug

I’d say that I’m paranoid about backups, but, honestly, I’m just realistic. Our entire computing architecture is designed to destroy data — because it’s designed for performant writes and reads. We aren’t writing on stone tablets [1], we’re writing on sand.

Realism means that for my most important machines I always have two backup systems with as much independence as I can manage. At work I use Retrospect/Win (historic reasons) and HP/Autonomy’s “Connected Backup”. At home I use Carbon Copy Cloner 3.x [2] and Apple’s infamous Time Capsule [3].

But maybe I’m not realistic enough. As of this moment three of my four backup systems have failed.

At work Retrospect/Win stopped launching — probably the victim of a corporate system/antivirus update/bug. “Connected Backup”, when I did a routine restore test, turned out to have made a mess of my backups — old data, missing data, etc.

At home meanwhile Time Capsule failed a routine restore test [4]. I could navigate my backups, but from my primary user account I couldn’t interact with the Time Machine UI. My clicks were ignored. I did some experimentation with different accounts and, as best I can tell, Time Machine wasn’t completely dead. It was just responding extreeeeeeeeeeemlllyyyyyyyy sloowwwwwllyyyyy - and missing my mouse clicks (maybe in the timeline it inhabited my clicks were too fast to be perceived. I used GB ethernet of course.).

I wasted a few hours trying to delete my main machine’s 1.4TB sparse bundle disk image; I tried all the tricks in the book to work around OS X’s inane file deletion limitations [5]. Nothing worked - perhaps because the drive had deeper hardware or permissions or file system problems (Time Capsule is an opaque system, probably running NetBSD.)

I gave up on the fix and wiped the Time Capsule drive, restoring new backups from each computer one at a time (via ethernet for initial backup). 

I’m going to take a look at Synology NAS options. In the meantime I’ll up my Time Capsule ‘single file restore’ checks; I wonder if I’ll have to wipe the Time Capsule every 6 months or so to get more reliable results.

- fn -

[1] At one time in the ancient world writing was done on clay tablets - designed for rapid erasure. It’s a lousy way to preserve data— except that in Nineveh great fire backed the tablets.

[2] Mostly a clone, but it moves updated files into an archival storage. It isn’t a great way to recover data that was corrupted months ago, but since I rotate 4hard drives to 3 locations (work, home, my van) I do have older versions of my data.

[3] Infamous for the world’s least practical user interface (LSD-fueled trip through a star field), awful performance, and cryptic failure modes.

[4] Every month I try restoring a small file; I’ve a Toodledo task for this that I just keep bumping ahead.

[5] Finder and most terminal deletes need to a reference to EVERY file to be deleted, and getconf ARG_MAX shows Mavericks has the same and limit as Mountain Lion: 262,144 arguments. Since a sparse bundle is a collection of 8MB files (“bands”) big bundles hit this limit.

Update 11/24/2014 - Twist

After wiping my Time Capsule drive and recreating my backup, I tried a restore.

It worked well with 2 of the 3 accounts I tried — but, again, not on my home account. The Time Machine window didn’t respond to mouse clicks. As shown in the attached screen photo there’s a pencil icon in bottom left with a slash through it (can’t write).

So I tried repairing permissions. It’s never worked before, and it didn’t work this time.

Next I verified my (SSD) drive — that hung about midway through. No error, it just didn’t complete.

So I booted from the recovery partition and ran Repair Disk — which did complete. Without any kind of error report.

Then I removed all peripherals and tried Time Machine. This time if I switched to a recent backup and waited a couple of minutes it DID respond and I COULD restore a test file for my problem user.

It seems that there’s something about that user’s account (by far largest and most complex) that causes Time Machine to take a VERY long time to be ready to interact with the user.

Update 11/25/2014 - I think it might have been the SSD.

At the same time I was wrestling this problem I was also preparing to apply Samsung’s fix for my increasingly slow Samsung EVO 840 SSD. As noted above I was seeing some odd behavior with Disk Utility — no error was reported, but Disk Utility seemed to hang waiting for a directory structure operation to complete. After I repaired the Disk Time Machine seemed to work.

After I had a working backup I ran the Samsung repair. Following that my startup times went from 20 seconds (faster than hard drive) to 2-3 seconds (SSD speed). Time Machine was also quite a bit faster.

My guess is that read failures on the directory structure for my problematic user account was causing Time Machine to hang. If so the problem wasn’t with the Time Machine backup, it was with the drive I wanted to restore too…