Deleting a sparsebundle: Disk Utility Erase doesn't work either. Or does it?

Years ago OS X Mountain Lion could not delete sparse bundles containing over 262,144 bands (2TB+). I don’t know if that’s still true, but when I had to remove a 1.7TB disk image today I first tried doing an Erase using Disk Utility.

Alas, this didn’t work. When I opened the image it was indeed empty. However First Aid on the volume reported it was corrupt. When I tried deleting it I got the usual OS X hang. 

So this problem is still around…

Update: on the other hand deleting the sparse bundle in Finder took 2-3 minutes rather than 12 hours. So maybe there’s something to this. 

Mac - how do I share images to Facebook?

There should be a word for AmITheLastPersonOnEarthToKnowThis?

It’s a weird feeling. 

For years I’ve been puzzled by a lack of Mac tools for uploading to Facebook. Around 2013 or so Apple’s photo applications got that ability, but both Aperture and iPhoto have been axed (I still use Aperture, though I now avoid its native Facebook integration and iTunes photo sync). So it seems we’re back to where we started from; Photos.app doesn’t seem to have a native share option.

Except I missed this: Share on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more — probably because by the time I adopt an Apple OS update my geek sources have moved on to the next one.

From the Finder, Photos.app, and newer apps there is a context menu share sheet extension similar to iOS, and it includes Facebook sharing. You can select multiple items and you can share to Timeline or a Facebook album. You can’t create a new album, you have to do that from Facebook. There’s no synchronization/album management (was problematic for me in Aperture anyway), it’s just an uploader.

An appreciated uploader, because I’ve never gotten Facebook’s album uploader to work for me on a Mac.

In Photos.app you can’t share directly from a Shared photo stream, but you can create an album from the photo stream images an share from that. You edit your share options (Extensions) in Preferences.

Update: BEWARE - i thought I uploaded a test album as “only me” (as above) but on Facebook it was Public. Maybe I clicked the wrong target, but be careful… 

 

iTunes 12 and iOS 8.4 photo sync bug with Aperture (and iPhoto?) causes silent sync failure for my Audiobooks

Props to app.net@clarkgoble for clueing me into this bug. I’d been seeing iTunes/iPhone sync hangs with my device, but when I returned iTunes seemed to have completed. I forgot, probably because I’m tired of tracking Apple’s issues [1], that iTunes “swallows” fatal errors during device synchronization. In retrospect it wasn’t completing sync.

The clue that I had a real problem was that I couldn’t get new Audiobooks, which must be transferred by old-time iTunes sync because they’re stuck in the 00s, to show up on my iPhone. Clark’s app.net note gave me the idea to turn off photo sync. With photo sync disabled iTunes put the Audiobooks on properly.

There are two Apple issues here. One is an iTunes/iOS bug with Aperture (and probably iPhoto), the other is that iTunes hides serious failures from its users. There’s not much hope for either bug. Aperture/iPhoto have been abandoned (as best I can tell nobody uses Photos.app) and the iTunes error-handling problem is quite old.

I’m going to also disable my Aperture screen saver module to further isolate Aperture for OS problems. Now that I have a workaround for Apple’s ancient network share photo slideshow bug I’ll just export our slideshow images to a thumb drive hanging off our Time Capsule.

[1] Apple’s software engineering issues are impressive. At this point Tim Cook has full responsibility — failure of a major organizational function is always the CEO’s responsibility.

Aperture - I think the Facebook integration may be bad news.

I ran into some Aperture issues lately, and in the process of debugging I created a new instance of my @40,000 image 300GB Library.

After the rebuild one Facebook album was empty, an album that showed with the number ’84’ in its title …

It’s not the only empty Facebook album, there’ve been a few over the years. There was also this:

Yeah, that’s weird.

I think I know what happened to the “Kayak” album — I think those were the images that behaved oddly. I exported them, deleted them in Aperture, and reimported. They were never 84 though — that’s weird enough that I’m going to dig through old backups to inspect older versions of Aperture. I suspect the count is a bug of some kind.

I don’t need this kind of risk. I loved being able to export albums to Facebook, but synchronization is hard, I don’t have much faith in Apple’s software engineering at the best of times, and Aperture is a dead product. 

So I went to remove my Facebook credentials from Aperture and I got this…

3996? 25 maybe. Yeah, this thing is really buggy. Since I was working from a reconstruction of my still existing Library I went ahead and removed. Here are the before and after image counts:

Yep, no change.

Now to try rsync -avnc $SOURCE $TARGET to see if I can figure out what did or didn’t make it to the reconstructed Library.

Update:

Tonight I started using Photos.app as an adjunct to managing my iCloud shared albums. I noticed it does not have Facebook integration. Pretty strong hint there.

I’ve setup a completely separate Library for interacting with Facebook — if nothing else it can be a convenient uploader and album manager. That way there’s no risk to my core Library. I’ll have to figure out some automation for moving images between the Libraries and up to Facebook.

Update 8/13/2015

I clearly don’t know how to use rsync. My attempt just returned a list of all the files in my original Library. Diff took overnight, but returned a list of files only in the original. I opened up the Library with Finder’s ‘Show Package Contents’, navigated to the Masters (what I really care about) and then drag-dropped the folder into terminal diff -rq to get:

diff -rq /Volumes/Media/Backup/Current.aplibrary/Masters /Users/jgordon/Pictures/Current.aplibrary/Masters

This returned a list of 50 files. Which was kind of worrisome, but on inspection they were all thumbnails that I’d found and purged; under some conditions, perhaps related to buggy/dangerous Facebook synchronization, Aperture misfiles lost thumbnails as Masters.

Audiobooks not showing in iOS 8.4 iBooks? That's because they're still like Movies used to be. Also, The Great Courses.

Decades ago I talked about a personal dementia prevention solution. A dementia test application would be hidden in the OS, but about once a year it would randomly launch. Once it appeared I’d have to complete it — or a lethal shock would be administered. Fail the test — get the shock. The shock would look like an accidental short-circuit, so life insurance would pay out.

I like to think ahead.

I’m pleased to report that today we do have a dementia test, though we’re still working on the electric shock. The test, of course, is Apple’s iTunes and related iOS apps. If you can make them behave then you’re still a potentially viable worker; not yet ready for the Soylent factory.

I gotta admit, things are getting a bit worrisome. For example, today’s audiobooks adventure. It started when Emily decided to pick up some lectures from “The Great Courses” (which we once new as the “Teaching Company”, indeed that’s still the corporate name). We started listening to these about 25 years ago, playing cassette tapes while driving our Mazda 323 cross-country and spritzing ourselves with water spray (no air conditioning).

It’s been a year or so since we bought from them — these days I mostly listen to In Our Time Podcasts [1]. We got one of their 80% off flyers [2] though, and it was hard to resist tormenting the kids with automotive education. So we bought a few. The distribution is a bit complex — DVD or CD (for most lectures you really only want audio, but we did DVD for the $40 photography class) or “Windows” / “Mac” files [3] and (usually) supplemental streaming.

What they don’t mention is that many of their lectures can be purchased from iTunes for less than the CD or audio file download costs in iOS friendly Audiobook format. That’s a lot more convenient than their other options, and cheaper too. So I bought two lectures that way, a short history of London (#3 and I are visiting in October) and Daily Life in the Ancient World [4].

That’s when the dementia test showed up. It’s been years since our last audiobook purchase (viz: In Our Time) and everything has changed [7]. It took a couple of Google searches to figure out that Audiobooks were now tucked away in an obscure corner of Apple’s brutally neglected iBooks.app. Some dungeon-chained Apple product manager decided they could be considered a kind of “Collection”. [5]

Okay, but I’d purchased them and they didn’t show up. Why was that? My Movies and Music and book-book purchases show up in iCloud. Why not these audiobooks? Google found me some documentation, the same team that decided an audiobook was a kind of “Collection” introduced an obscure control as an attribute of a particular Collection called “Hide iCloud Books” (even though these aren’t, you know, Books. Do you see a trend here?)

So I turned that Off, so they wouldn’t hide. That’s a double negative I guess.

Except they still didn’t show up.

This began to remind me of the old days, when we’d have one chance to buy music or videos and everything was managed and backed up using iTunes. Yep, it’s just like that, unchanged from 2013. Download to your phone, and it stays on your phone [6]. No iCloud joy, no freedom from iTunes, you need the old beast still.

Just audiobooks mind you. And, of course, it’s not documented.

Apple must be a desperate place to work these days…

- fn -

[1] Still using Apple’s awful Podcasts.app. Podcasts.app and iBooks.app should chasten those who clamor for iTunes to be be divided into separate apps. Be afraid.

[2] Their pricing is a bit nuts — high list prices and large discounts. Do look for discount codes and the like before purchasing, though the iTunes audiobook prices are often quite reasonable

[3] Their audio/video file format recommendations are bit odd, but I didn’t have time to dig into it. Does Windows 10 still prefer wmv?

[4] I’ve chatted on app.net about writing a book that would describe a ‘day in the life’, from pooping to earning money to playing with kids across history and geography. So I’m looking forward to this one.

[5] Collections used to be sort of meaningful in iBooks, but that ended a year ago.

[6] Well, not quite. If you go to your iTunes purchase record, click on problem and say you had trouble downloading, the purchases are added again to the download list. I had my original purchases, but tried that as an experiment.

[7] Very much for the worse. Audiobooks had a large regression with iOS 7. iOS 8.4 is, in some ways, a partial improvement on iOS 7. Which mostly shows how bad iOS 7 was. Tim Cook has failed to rescue Apple’s long ailing software engineering.

[8] It no longer works to manage iPhone content from both iTunes and iOS. It never worked well, but these days it doesn’t work at all. iTunes can’t synchronize device and desktop states. So if you use Audiobooks, and you have any hope of sensible software behavior, you probably need to go all iTunes for media management.

Update 8/13/2015: Audiobooks not being synchronized to iPhone

I thought I was done, but the Audiobooks wouldn’t sync to my iPhone. That turned out to be a side-effect of an iOS/iTunes bug with photo sync from Aperture. The Aperture photo sync bug causes iTunes sync to silently fail (no UI indication) prior to Audiobook transfer. Removing photo sync let the process complete.

 

Aperture misbehaves: images that can't be moved between projects

I have a  set of images in Aperture that cannot be moved between projects. If I try to move them they are copied.

I’ve repaired permissions and done the standard database repair to no effect.

I’ve inspected the images in the Finder by exploring the Package contents and searching on the Aperture provided file names — they appear unremarkable. 

I’m afraid something in my Aperture database is broken, but I’m reluctant to do a full database restoration. I don’t know how much data will be lost. 

I fear multiple backups and a full database rebuild are in my future…

Update 

I researched this a bit, glad that a few old Aperture sites are still around. Two useful references:

• Get help with Aperture 3 - Apple Support: Apple’s cumulative troubleshooting document
• How do I repair or rebuild my Aperture library or permissions? | PhotosApps.Expert

I think I’ll try importing into a new project. I have a 500 GB Library on a 1TB SSD, but I can start the import into a peripheral drive tonight.

Remember when database/file system corruption was a solved problem?

Porting a landline number to a prepaid account with Google Voicemail -- then turning off the phone. Would that work?

As of today we are almost free of CenturyLink, the latest telecomm Titanic. Our final connection is a minimal (no features, no long distance) $17-20/month landline service that should theoretically support our old security system and keep our longstanding home phone number for incoming calls [1].

That’s not as good as it sounds however, since for much of the past 14 days we’ve had no phone service at all; we’ve been forwarding the home number to a cell number while we wait for CenturyLink’s second attempt to restore basic service. Even in the near term CenturyLink landline service is probably not a viable option.

There are 3 obvious alternatives excluding Comcast and simple mobile port. [3]

1. AT&T Home Phone: $20/month add-on to our AT&T family plan, and if anyone can port from CenturyLink it’s AT&T. On the other hand, we may want to leave AT&T for Ting or T-mobile sometime in the next few months.
2. Obihai SIP/VOIP devices with integrated Google Voice. (see also: porting to Obihai/GV by way to AT&T burner)
3. Port to Googe Voice via AT&T burner.

I wonder if there’s a fourth alternative. This would be a prepaid plan that is compatible with Google Voicemail. I know H2O wireless can do this and it’s very cheap, but their service level is fairly spartan. Ting might be good at $9/month with an old GSM iPhone 4, but it’s not clear they support Google Voicemail (maybe on GSM but not CDMA?).

 

With a prepaid plan that had a low monthly minimum fee, we could setup Google Voicemail then power off the phone. All messages would then go to voicemail, but not use any minutes. We’d just be paying for routing to Google Voice, but we’d have the option of powering up the phone.

 

Anyone try that?

 

- fn - 

[1] It is notoriously hard to port a number from CenturyLink. As of 2011 they had a waiver for violating local number portability mandates. I think they are technically obligated to port, but few people seem to succeed.
[2] H2O wireless is even cheaper, at $40/year for a similar level of service. But H2O is a true bottom-feeder — ok for a kid phone but not quality enough for our home number. Porting from H2O, for example, is quite chancy. Other alternatives would be a Sprint or T-Mobile or AT&T burner phone, but their minimal per-month costs are likely higher.
[3] Comcast is our new internet provider. They are also universally hated. We’d prefer to keep them as the dumbest pipe possible and minimize dependencies on them. A simple port to a mobile number is higher cost as AT&T home phone without the AT&T benefits. We don’t want to change our existing mobile numbers and we don’t want to lose the home phone number (yet).