Moving Walkway

This is the list of things I’d like to hear announced at MacWorld, some big, some small:

• Video playlists on the iPod touch and Apple TV. I’ve wanted this for a long time. Last week I discovered that my wife’s nano already has this. So it should be on all “devices/platforms”
• iPhone apps on the iPod Touch. There is no reason the touch should not have mail, weather, stocks, and Google Maps. Having used them on my hacked touch for a month now, they work just how I’d like and the touch is SO much more valuable to me now.
• Microphone add-on for the touch, maybe with a speaker also. Do for the touch what the iTalk did for the earlier iPods. But it needs to be full duplex so it will work with Skype when 3rd party apps are officially supported.
• Ultra small laptop. A small professional laptop would be great. An 11 or 12 inch screen, but super hi-rez (DPI of the iPhone). Touch screen would be nice. My wife’s MacBook would be ok for me to use at work, but I really want a little more and the MacBook Pro’s are a little big for my “on the road” use in the new job.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had two hard drive failures. I have mixed backup setups currently…some things are backed up often, some things are backed up once in a blue moon, and others never. Some things I’ve learned over this experience.

• I had preferred Seagate drives because they had 5 year warrantees. I figure if they had the confidence to offer it, the drives would (statistically) last longer. I don’t believe this anymore, 2 Seagate drives have failed, 2 Maxtor drives and 1 Fujitsu drive. Of all these, only the Fujitsu drive was under a warrantee (and it was something like 4.5 years old).
• Seagate OEM drives are not covered by a 5 year manufacturer warrantee. You have to goto the OEM. Apple in the case of my 18 month old Mac Mini, but I didn’t have AppleCare. The other case it was a bare drive (now 3 years old) I bought which was an OEM drive (not sure I realized it, but maybe I did based on price).
• You need multiple backups “just in case.” Backups copied to other machines, copied to external hard drives, copied to network file servers, internet based backup solutions. We’ll see how Time Machine does on the Mac.
• Disk Warrior worked well for me. It saved my bacon. I had all of my Music, but my pictures had not been backed up (off site DVD) for about 18 months. By booting the Disk Warrior CD, it was able to save most everything. I had to copy it to an external drive, but that was painless…just plug a Mac formatted USB drive in and say “copy all” to that volume.
• SeaTools (Seagate’s diagnostic tool) isn’t very good. I’m not entirely sure, but Seatools seams weak. I took the “failed” drive that had read errors and tested it with Seatools. It failed with read errors, not a diagnostic code. I tried a zero write on the whole drive. I think this said it worked. This is supposed to make the drive attempt a write and read, and if something has problems, deal with it. The drive still failed. I almost threw the drive in the trash.
• PowerMax (Maxtor’s old diagnostic tool before Seagate bought Maxtor) seams to work pretty well. I only have version 1.14 (or something like that) and can’t download 1.46 (the latest) because Seagate thinks SeaTools is the answer. PowerMax was able to “format” the drive and it now passes all of the tests in both PowerMax AND Seatools. Time will tell if it is really fine, or if the problem has just gone underground and is waiting to rise from the dead.

In the end I haven’t lost anything on either computer, but it was close. I need to put a complete backup strategy in place, but I struggle with the right way given the number of computers, the amount of data and my desire to make it very low cost. Perhaps I’m being penny wise and pound foolish. The smartest thing was to spend $100 on Disk Warrior early in the process.

[tags]harddrive, failure, backup, apple, seagate, seatools, powermax[tags]

TidBITS: New iPods: The Worst Ever!

So Joe Kissell writes a bunch of words that amount to “I have no use for an iPod, so why do I keep thinking I want one?” Where the answer I have is “if the shoe don’t fit…”

Over the years that I’ve had various iPods, I’ve gone through phases of little use and great use. My original one (one of the first one’s out of Apple at eh original launch) is still in use by my older son. First there was music, then I didn’t use it much. Then there was Audible support, then I didn’t use it much. Then there were podcasts and I now use it all the time… music, podcasts, even audiobooks.

The key to my using it more is that I have places to listen to it. The car, where the Flexdock makes it so easy. On the golf course, where the shuffle works so well. In the gym or just out and about. But I use it because I can and I’ve accepted it.

Why bother to write WHY you don’t need one. If you don’t need it, don’t get it…move along, nothing to see here.

[tags]ipod[/tags]

I like to get my Verizon phone bill in paper format. Besides the fact that I’m less likely to view it on-line and pay it given the way I manage my bills, I’ve never found their e-mail notices to be accurate, timely, or effective.

But what bugs me here is that they tricked me. The site changes often enough that I generally just “go with the flow” when paying my bill on-line. This time I when I clicked “Submit” to pay my bill a pop-up came up (probably DHTML type, not a browser pop-up). I said “yes I accept” thinking it was the confirmation of my payment request.

NOPE! It was me accepting that I was requesting paperless billing. That is just crap. To make it worst, after saying “thanks for saving us money by going paper free,” it returned my to the same payment form and I had to click “Submit” again to process my payment.

It was a total trick. They didn’t even alter the workflow in the trick, they simply intercepted my click. Just like a virus, Trojan, phisher would. Very lame. I’m half tempted to call up and ask for my paper bill turned back on. Of course, I’m sure that will imply a monthly charge.

[tags]verizon, bad+ui[/tags]