Drive Through…

Today, 11th August marks the first full month with my new iPhone. Thoughts so far:

• The back is proving to be very resilient to scratches, more so than my metal backed iPod Touch proved to be
• Battery life is reasonable for me now that the novelty factor has worn off. I mostly get away with charging every other night
• Having data access everywhere is fantastic. I love being able to check Twitter whilst standing in a queue for lunch
• Having data access everywhere is a curse. I’ve been told off by my wife a number of times for checking email etc.
• I’ve only used 28MB of data in a whole month.
• GPS and Google Maps whilst not true sat-nav can be very, very useful. It navigated me around a number of flooded roads on Saturday.
• Not having data when roaming is really annoying (unless you want to pay the huge roaming fee)
• The length of time that backup takes when syncing is annoying
• Twitteriffic, Facebook and Texas Hold ‘Em are my top three apps.
• It does seem kind of slow to draw/refresh/respond to touch when doing some tasks such as opening contacts or the settings page.
• All in all, I love it.

• It wasn’t hard to get one if you were prepared. I pre-ordered early the day the pre orders started and was ok. There was a bloke in front of my in the O2 Blanchardstown store who pre-ordered a 16GB and was only offered an 8GB, despite his protestations about being ‘the first person’ to pre-order.
• O2 ported over my pre-pay number right there and then. I’m used to this taking days in the UK.
• Sign up and activation was painless. I think mainly because I had it all done by 10am Dublin time and Ireland is a small country anyway.
• The device is noticeable heavier and fatter than my 16GB iPod touch, which is not a criticism, just a difference to be expected and gotten used to.
• The Home button seems to require more of a firm press than the Touch.
• The multi-touch screen seems like it has been slowed down a bit from the Touch. Presses need to be a bit firmer and scrolling seems slower.
• Love the volume and silent buttons. LOVE the speaker and not having to find a pair of headphones just to watch a quick video or listen to a song.
• It makes and receives phone calls.
• No visual voicemail - now I have one I honestly don’t care. I maybe get 1 voicemail a month and never have to trawl through any others to get to it. I can understand the value for heavy users, but that ain’t me.
• It sends and receives text messages. I honestly cannot remember the last time I sent or got an MMS - not bothered about that.
• Wifi with enterprise access at at last. However I haven’t been able to get it to work at work, due to the fact that there is a rogue unprotected adhoc access point somewhere with the SSID I need to use and that’s all the phone will see.
• I need to get over the mental hurdle of being stingy with using cellular data. So far I’ve used 244K of download. I still get a slight panic when I tap on Weather or Stocks and it just goes off and gets data. So I only (only?) have 1GB per month, but I need to just go with the flow and treat data access as a normality.
• App Store - immediate downloads: Twitteriffic, the light saber thing, Facebook and Exposure.
• App Store - there’s lots missing from the Irish store. No games at all, and certain other apps are not there. I WANT SUPER MONKEYBALL!!!
• The Remote app is teh awsomeness. It may just make me get an Apple TV just to show it off!
• There’s lots of crud and no way to get through it other than scrolling. More evident on the iPhone interface than iTunes. Let me ignore the app developers producing ebooks or bible stuff please!
• I’ve not paid a penny for an app yet. I want to hear the wisdom of those who have. I want a good weight of reviews.
• GPS - well I went outside and it knew where I was, so it works. So does cellular triangulation.
• Maps - tried to search for ‘Hotel’ when located at home. It gave me three results. IN THE WHOLE OF DUBLIN! I know this isn’t a phone issue, it is a data issue. Come on Irish companies, start advertising yourselves - your market just got a whole lot more mobile.

So, as stated in the update to the previous entry, I’m now planning on getting an iPhone 2 as and when July 1tth comes around and I can get a fulfilled order. The begging question then is what to do with the 16GB iPod Touch I already have. My initial thoughts are:

• Keep the Touch as the main sync’d source of my music and video, thus keeping it paired with the iMac at home
• Set up the iPhone with my work MBP to sync stuff like podcasts, videocasts, photos and applications from app store

Basically use 32GB of storage, across two devices, for different purposes. With twice the battery life.

The iPhone will live with me, and I might sync a small amount of music to it as well. The touch will come out on trips. When I’m on a train/flight etc and want extended amounts of video/music. Also when I’m sat working at my desk.

Another potential would be to use one for music and one for video. I’m ripping more and more video from DVD to an iPod Touch/iPhone friendly format using Handbrake, but at the moment I have to juggle the 16GB of space on the Touch between that and the music library which is 32Gb on it’s own.

When working at home I invariably end up sitting at my desk working on the Thinkpad whilst my iMac plays music to me or tunes me into BBC Radio 5 (especially PMQs on a Wednesday)

I’ve recently set the iMac to display the iTunes artwork screensaver, and have found myself entranced by it. For those that haven’t seen it, the screensaver shows a mosaic of album covers (40 at a time on my 24″ iMac) and flips one over every couple of seconds to reveal another. My main fixation has been a desire to see a screen full of artwork from what I consider to be good music. Like any music collection, there are a few black sheep in amongst the 830 albums and singles that live in my library. That Simply Red CD seemed like a good idea at the time…

It is quite distracting to sit there and stare at the Gabriel album, willing the screensaver to choose that one to flip over next. The bad ones seem to stay the longest, and Apple plays with your mind by always seeming to make sure there is a bad egg on the screen at all times. It’s not even like I rate my music, how does it know??

A little while ago I reached breaking point and had to just put everything else on hold and wait for that perfect moment:

(Large version on flickr)

I can’t say I’m completely happy with it. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance are dodgy to say the least, whilst The Darkness and Catatonia are both albums I’d probably not want to be seen listening to nowadays.

However, the more interesting game is to try and spot serendipitous arrangements of albums. This is highlighted nicely in the above screenshot by this example:

If defunct mid-ninetines Bristolians The Crescent and erstwhile singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt ever got together to release a gatefold double vinyl album this must surely be the artwork!

Incidentally, you may wonder how you capture a screenshot of a screen saver? Well on OS X it turns out that if you press Cmd-Shift before starting the screen saver by pressing “Test” in the preferences panel, you can then take as many shots of the screen saver in action by keeping Cmd-Shift held down and pressing 3 for each shot. Nice. And yes, it did mean that I kept my fingers down on those buttons for about 20 minutes in the production of this blog post…

For no particular reason other than I saw Roo’s What’s in my bag and felt left out that I’m not travelling anywhere any time soon. View on flickr to see notes.

O2 Ireland are bringing the iPhone here on 14th March.

Some points:

• No unlimited data plan. 1GB per month limit. 2c per MB after that. That works out at just over €20 for an extra GB/month.
• No visual voicemail
• €399 for the 8GB, €499 for the 16GB
• €45 per month for the cheapest tarrif giving 175 minutes and 100 texts per month. 18 month agreement.

So, am I going to get one? No. Why?

• I already have a 16GB iPod touch that does just about everything I need bar making calls
• My Nokia N80 suits me fine.
• I’ll wait for the 3G iPhone to come along thanks.
• The handset prices are too high, coming in at more than £50 more expensive than you’d pay on O2 UK for a 16GB model.
• I’m a Speakeasy (PAYG) customer. Those contract rates look stupid compared to what you get on O2 in the UK. £35 for 600 minutes, 500 texts, unlimited data and visual voicemail. I’m not about to sign up for 18 months of what o2.ie are offering.
• No indication of any wifi hotspot deal such as O2 UK have with The Cloud.

All in all the term rip-off springs to mind.

So Apple have announced an event for 6th March (see TUAW) Here’s my wishes:

• Obviously the SDK is going to be released. I hope this provides support for the iPod Touch as well.
• Flash would be nice
• Enterprise capabilities? Well support for 802.11 authentication and LEAP would be nice!
• There’s already a VPN client, but I don’t know if I can use it to get into IBM (I suspect not) One where I knew I could would be cool

Well you kind of let me down with the Macbook Air. 1 USB port? No replaceable battery? Lack of the syncing stuff I hoped for. And the price…

However, I’ll let you off since you gave me this:

£12.99 well spent. The touch was already eminently useable for most of my browsing and media needs, now it’s even more so.

Everybody else in the tech universe seems to be making predictions about what Steve Jobs is going to come up with today, so here’s mine:

• He will announce the new Macbook Air, as many have reported is likely.
• Also as widely discussed it will be thin, very thin, and likely have nothing more in terms of ports than a couple of USB and power. Network? Wireless only. Peripherals? USB and Bluetooth, including things like headphones. No external monitor capability.
• Explaining away the lack of Firewire, Jobs will announce that Apple will put their support behind USB3.0 and Wireless USB from now on with Firewire still supported for legacy reasons on desktop, Macbook and Macbook Pro hardware. Macbook Air probably won’t have enough disk for video editing anyway…
• Disk will be solid state.
• Will support two essential use-cases - standalone laptop machine in which case you will likely need the USB optical drive accessory, or much more interestingly it will be able to sync up to a host machine e.g. iMac. iTunes on the Air will sync to a host iTunes in much the same way as Apple TV does.
• iTunes 8.0 will support DVD ripping and iTunes movie rentals. You can rip your DVDs to your host Mac and sync them to the Air or via USB optical drive directly. Movie rentals are a no brainer.
• The syncing mechanism will be extended to include your home directory, settings etc, allowing your Air to be a truly portable mini-copy of your desktop Mac back home.
• Naturally remote syncing will be supported via a combination of .Mac and Back To My Mac.
• Time Machine will be updated so that it knows not to backup synced content on an Air that is already being backed up on a host Mac. That is if you are using the host Mac as the Time Machine destination.
• It won’t have any sort of multi-touch interface, just keyboard and trackpad.
• It will be powerful enough to run stuff like Aperture or Lightroom for photo editing with comfort, and the screen will be widescreen, probably not OLED yet.

Ok, I confess, this isn’t so much a prediction as a wish list. Whilst I love my iMac to pieces I would like to be able to take it on the road sometimes, especially when away on trips and I want to do some photo editing. I don’t need things like optical drives, external monitor ports or at a push a wired network connection. What I do need however is to not feel like I would have to maintain data between two machines. This is why I’ve never bought a companion Macbook for instance. Currently you either go mobile with a Macbook/Pro and compromise on disk and screen real-estate, or you stay deskbound with an iMac/Mini/Mac Pro. The Air would seem to fill the gap between the two allowing desktop Mac owners to take their data on the road without feeling like they have a whole management problem with two machines.

I know I’d buy one like a shot…

Historically I’ve been pretty poor at keeping backups of my data. Recently however I’ve become aware of the need to be more vigilant in this area. Touch wood I have never suffered a disk failure on any computer I’ve owned, so I reckon I’m overdue one. The fact that my iMac disk now contains the results of months spent ripping my CD collection as well as a growing library of photographs it is time to take it seriously.

For the past few months I’ve been using the excellent SuperDuper! to perform backups of the iMac. However although the software is good I didn’t set up a scheduled backup so it relied on me to remember to run it regularly. Secondly the backup was performed to a Lacie 500GB Big Disk Extreme. Whilst this is an excellent external disk and runs very fast over Firewire 800, it is actually two 250GB disks arranged in a RAID 0 configuration. RAID 0 means that the two disks combine together and data is striped over them. This makes read and write access faster than a single disk, but has a big potential problem when the disk is used for backup, namely that if one disk fails then you lose all your data. Effectively you are doubling your risk of a hardware failure. Not ideal.

With the arrival of OS X 10.5 Leopard and the built in Time Machine backup I’ve decided to sort out my backup solution in a proper fashion. Therefore I’ve just ordered one of these beauties:

The Lacie 2big Triple is a 1TB triple interface (USB2, Firewire 400 and Firewire 800) drive. Like the extreme it actually contains two 500GB drives that make up the total capacity. The difference however is that this one supports RAID 1 as well. RAID 1 puts the disks in mirror mode, meaning that they both contain a copy of the same data. Thus, if one disk fails the other one is still there to serve your data. What’s more the drives are hot-swappable so you can replace the failed one and it will spin the new one up and copy everything onto it to bring it in line. In fact the disks can work in four modes: the aforementioned RAID 0 and RAID 1, plus JBOD which allows both disks to act as separate volumes, and Big which just creates a single volume without RAID support.

A couple of years ago consumer level (read affordable) hot-swappable RAID arrays were unheard of, so I’m really looking forward to throwing Time Machine at this beast. Unfortunately for the time being I’ll probably have to leave my Adobe Lightroom catalog out of the backup until the Leopard compatible fixes are available later this month. In the meantime I’ll back all my photos up to the old Lacie.

Of course, any comprehensive backup strategy will include offsite storage, afterall if the flat burns down or we get broken into then I could lose the iMac and the backed up data. I’m not yet sure what the best way to go with offsite is. Either buy a cheaper 500GB external disk and run a SuperDuper backup onto it every now and then and take it into the office to store, or try online storage with something like Amazon S3 or even .Mac. The latter is probably more reliable as I can script it to happen without needing to remember to bring a disk home every so often. I need to work out if it is cost effective for the 300GB or so of data which I need to have backed up.