Yesterday, Apple Launch a complete new line of music players. Every player is renewed. The biggest changes are:
As I might have mentioned my 'old' iPod Photo 20GB is acting up, so I was kinda going to buy me a new one, but which one do I want? The
iPhone touch is just gorgeous, but the iPod Classic holds ton's of music and video's...... *sigh*.
Guess I have to let fate decide....
Everyone who has worked a bit with Linux/Unix/OSX knows that the command '
rm -rf *' is kinda destructive (understatement). Compare it with the old '
deltree.exe' command in MS-DOS. The latter explains it without saying too much about it.
Anyway, yesterday I ran into an annoyance of OSX (and it wasn't the first time I ran into it). Every once in a while when I mount a smb share on my MacBook Pro nothing happens. When I try to connect again I get a message that I'm already connected to that share :?: :?: , but there's no visible indication in the Finder of this.
The way to see the shortcut to the share (for me at least) is to relaunch Finder (Force Quit). But this is highly annoying.
Yesterday I decided to take a look under the hood, and started terminal and opened the Volumes directory. This contained over 30 sub directories, and they all had names similar to the smb shares (ftp, ftp-1, ftp-2, web, web-1, etc). the directories were empty (the +10 I checked anyway), so I wanted to delete al those directories in the hope that my annoying messages about being connected would be gone.
First I entered every directory and removed the
.DS_STORE file by hand and after that I removed the directory with
rmdir. This would take more time than I wanted to spend, so I needed something quicker, and what's quicker than the rm command with all the appropriate switches??
I made sure that I wasn't executing the command from the root of the drive (he, I'm not that stupid). So after I executed the command I heard something weird. I heard the hard disks in my server go crazy.....
Aaaaaarrrggghhhh
Somehow there still was a share mounted, and the rm command was recursively deleting ALL content on the share. By the time I realized this (about 5 to 10 seconds) my 300GB drive was 90% empty instead of 95% full.Thankfully I had some excellent undelete tools on my server so I was able to recover the content over the network to my PC, and after that I could copy them back to my share.
Apple released the iPhone last Friday in the US. I didn't report on this, because a) I can't get my hands on it atm, b) there was a lot of media coverage this weekend, c) I had better things to do.
They sold over half a million phones this weekend. That's great, BUT....
There are some elementary things missing on the phone. Things I couldn't live with. Most of them are mentioned
here.
As you might have noticed, I have a Nokia E61i at this moment. This phone was meant to be kinda temporary, since the iPhone won't be available in Europe just yet. But if Apple won't resolve most of those 'issues' there won't be an iPhone for me.
How lame is it that you can't use Bluetooth the way it's meant for transferring files, 'abusing' it for a modem, so you can hook it up to your laptop and surf the Internet. At this moment, every other (Windows Mobile or Symbian based) phone on the market with has more functionality than the current iPhone. The only drawback on the current phones is that they're not made by Apple.
So I'll stick to my Nokia until they fixed those elementary functions.
A couple of day's ago, I tried to play an episode of
Painkiller Jane on my Nokia E61i. The original format was in the DivX format, so I used
VisualHub to convert it on my Mac to the MP4 format (320 pixels wide).
This part was relatively easy. The next step was a bit harder; trying to get the 100MB file from my Mac on the Nokia. Somehow, there's no way of transferring the file from a Mac to the Nokia via USB. The USB connection works file with
iSync, but this has no option of synching files. When connecting, the phone gives you the option of using the 'PC Suite' or 'Data Transfer'. The first is using iSync, and the latter gives you an error that the devices can't be recognized.
Nokia does have an application for the Mac to transfer files to, and from the phone (
Nokia Media Transfer). BUT, the Nokia E61 is NOT supported
This means you're left with Bluetooth, or using a web server and download the file. If you don't own your own webserver you're stuck with Bluetooth (which is terribly slow b.t.w.). Both are a pain in the butt in getting large fils on the phone. I had to resume the download via the web server about 10 times before I had downloaded it, and Bluetooth... well don't get me started on that.
My advice; don't use a Mac to transfer large files to the phone, but use
Nokia PC Suite with the USB cable on a PC to do that.
B.t.w. the Nokia E61i played the episode just fine.
Tried to use my new Nokia E61i for surfing the Internet with my laptop (Windows XP), but this just wouldn't work. Errors were plenty, but no bit made it to the Internet for some reason. Strange, because my older 6230 (or whatever model it was) worked perfectly.
After cursing a couple of times, I needed to make sure that this wasn't a defect in the phone, so I tried it with my Mac Book Pro (which is for sale by the way ;-) ). Obviously, this worked straight away. Just used the same settings / profile from my older phone....
Windows never keeps to amaze me (in a negative way that is).
Apple started shipping
new Mac Book Pro's. These new little gems are based on the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset. This means, more power, and less power consumption. They also refitted the laptops with LED backlit screens to reduce power consumption.
Other features include;
- 2GB RAM (4GB max instead of 3GB)
- 802.11n WiFi
- Larger and faster hard disks (>120GB)
Boy, this makes me wanna upgrade.. Anyone fancy a first generation Mac Book Pro for a couple of bucks?
A new version of iTunes has been made available (7.2) to the public. The new iTunes support the new iTunes Music Store with DRM free music files.
Some sites found out that the DRM-free music does contain your iTunes account info (username and full name). Probably to make sure that you won't share you purchased music on P2P networks...
More good news from Apple is the upcoming update on the Apple TV. The Apple TV will be made available with a bigger hard drive (160GB instead of 40GB). And a upcoming software updates allows the user to watch YouTube videos om the Apple TV.
Now we only need native DivX/XviD support on the Apple TV.....
I've been using iTunes for a couple of years now. It took getting used to in the beginning. Recently, iTunes offers the ability to get the album art from the iTunes music store (you do need an account there).
In the old days, I got the covers from Amazon.com, but hey, when it's automated, who am I to complain.... till now
The downloaded ablum art from the iTunes store doesn't show up on the iPod... Why? Now I still have to get the album covers from Amazon (or another source), if I want the pictures to show up on my iPod.
The probabe cause might be that the album art I manual download and attach to songs is actually added to the mp3, while the iTunes automated-album-art-getter is only a reference to a image on the hard drive.
Well, at least I've got something to do tomorrow when it's raining.
AppleInsider found a filed
patent by Apple that reveiles a possible future new iPod design.
And again, I can't wait
The rumor engines are buzzing with '
news' about a new Wi-Fi iPod. The estimated release would be the holiday season (X-mas). This means an even more expensive X-mas... iPhone, Wi-Fi iPod, OSX Leopard.... all due in the second half of this year.
Better start saving some money :-)
B.t.w. I have some doubts on the delay announcements of Leopard. The announcement was only a small article on their (hot)news page. Apple stock didn't suffer that much with the announcement. What would happen to the apple stock if they will ship it during the
WWDC?
During the WWCD keynote, Steve would tell us about all the great features in Leopard (some of them were kept secret to prevent the copiers at Microsoft :-) ). And at the end of the keynote:
Oh yeah, there is one more thing..... We're shipping Leopard as scheduled starting TODAY! ....
[crowd goes absolutely, and totally berserk]
Together with iLife 2007, and the new iWork....
[crowd goes mental....]
[Steve checks his Apple stock options on his iPhone]
