Mac » That Not So Fresh Feeling

Another iCloud Lesson Learned

Apple, Google Calendar, Mac No Responses »

Oct 302011

Katie was managing 4 or 5 different versions of calendars between her iPhone, Mac, and Google Calendar. It was leading to dupes (and trips!) of things showing up and just making a general mess. So I thought I would help. I get everything reduced to just a couple of calendars synced to iCloud.

Then I go to move her Google Calendar to iCloud like I did with my own GCal. I export her ics file, import it into iCal, and merge it into her normal calendar.

Everything looks normal.

Until iCloud starts sending out acceptance emails to people for meetings from her work calendar (that had been synched with Google Calendar back in 2008 and 2009).

Yep, tens, maybe hundreds of acceptances to meetings that were years old. I’m sure there’s a setting that I missed somewhere, but that just doesn’t seem like the right thing, Apple, now does it?

MacBook ProAir

Apple, Mac, Technology No Responses »

Sep 112011

I’ve got a 2 year old MacBook Pro (15-inch) that I use as my work and home machine. It’s got my canonical iTunes music collection, my photo collection, all of my archived mail, files, whatever.

It is the one machine to rule them all.

I try to do a lot of smart stuff to keep my machine and data safe, since pretty much everything I care about is on it. I have a Time Machine backup that I keep up-to-date religiously. I sync a collection of documents to Dropbox as an off-site backup. The music and photos get sync’d to another machine on my home network.

Nothing groundbreaking, but I try to do what I can to keep this machine happy and healthy.

Over the past few months, as often happens, software upgrades and new applications put a little extra stress on the hard drive and CPU, so things started to get just a bit slower. Things might stutter a bit as I scroll down a web page, or flip between applications. Just enough to annoy me while I worked and make me look longingly at Katie’s MacBook Air with its nice solid-state drive and near instance application loading and boot up.

So, I tried to do the best thing I could do, short of buying a new machine and having to go through all of the work to make that new machine the machine. I SSD-ified it[1].

Well, first, actually, I found out that I could upgrade the RAM to 8GB. $45 later, I had my shiny 8GB RAM kit, took the 10 minutes to install it, and in the couple of weeks since I installed it, my machine has gone into swap a grand total of 500 times (or so). In the couple of weeks before that, it’d gone into swap millions of times. Score one for memory.

The final step was the actual SSD-ification. I found a reasonably good deal on 256GB SSD (at MicroCenter, and grabbed a USB enclosure for the disk I’d be removing at the same time for $8). When I got home from my excusion, I loaded up Carbon Copy Cloner, and cloned my existing data onto the SSD. About 2.5 hours later, I had this nice SSD with all of my data on it.

Again, another 15 minute surgery to the laptop, and I had removed the old drive, placed in the new SSD, and closed things back up.

This machine now flies. iTunes starts in seconds. Excel opens up in seconds rather than minutes. It boots up and loads up my settings in less than a minute.

It’s a giant MacBook Air.

And, at the same time, I’ve now gained a nice backup drive (remember that USB enclosure). Every week or so, I can clone off my entire drive and have a 3rd backup of my data.

All in, the upgrades cost me about $450, which is less than half the cost of buying a brand-new low end MacBook Air, and about a quarter of what a new MacBook Pro will cost. I’m guessing I’ve added at least another year or two to the life of this machine.

It’s probably one of the easiest and most productive upgrades you can perform on your aging laptop.

There’s a great guide to this over on Ars Technica. ↩

Back to Safari

Apple, Google, Mac 2 Responses »

Jan 232011

For the past 6 months or so, I’ve been using Google Chrome as my main browser. It met the requirements I had for a browser better than anything else out there:

Starts fast
Loads pages fast
Has Firebug-like functionality
Let’s me avoid Flash wherever possible
Has a PwdHash extension so I can easily use different passwords
Has an AdBlock implementation

Chrome has the nice addition of having the Firefox-like single box to enter a URL or search (including site search, which was super, super nice).

Then, Chrome went and made the big announcement of dropping H.264 support, and that (along with some recent crashes) made me take a look at using a different browser again.

Normally, I’d probably switch back to Firefox, but even with the recent improvements, I find Firefox’s startup time and general performance to be much worse than either Chrome or Safari. So I took a look at whether or not I could use Safari full time.

Off of my checklist, the first two are easy. Safari starts fast and loads pages fast. If you install the ClickToFlash extension (which disables Flash unless you tell it to run), it runs remarkably fast. This also meets my “avoid Flash wherever possible” item.

Next up, AdBlock and Firebug. All WebKit browsers (Safari/Chrome) have a nice Web Developer toolkit. Safari also has some extensions that have been built to mimic 75% of the Firebug functionality, and a full AdBlock implementation.

Basically, Safari did everything I needed it to and did it fast. Except generate my passwords per-site the way PwdHash did. For me, that’s sort of a dealbreaker for me. (To be fair, there’s a Javascript bookmarklet, but it’s not as clean.) In my copious spare time (or, during the football games today, since the Pats somehow were disqualified for being too good), I started building a PwdHash extension.

Safari extensions are actually pretty cool, and simple to build. It’s just HTML and Javascript (and CSS, if you so choose). I ripped apart the existing bookmarklet, hooked it up with some Safari-extension goodness, and in a couple of hours, have a PwdHash extension that does exactly what I want. Awesome-o.

I’m pretty happy after a couple of days back on Safari, though there are a couple of little things I wish worked differently (I would love favicons in the bookmark bar, and would love to imitate the Firefox/Chrome behavior where the location/search bar are integrated).

Safari also gives you a couple of nice features&emdash;it is the only browser that’s built as a purely native Mac app and takes advantage of all the nifty OSX features (data detectors, looking up words in the dictionary, other services). We’ll see how I feel after a few weeks of using Safari as my main browser, but at least initially, I’m pretty pleased.

More On How Much OmniFocus Rocks

iPhone, Mac No Responses »

Oct 252010

Shawn Blanc sums it up better than I can.

And he turns me on to OmniFocus‘ free sync server, and themes. So now my OmniFocus looks bad-ass to go along with keeping me sane by allowing me to throw everything I need to do in it.

Basically, every day, I find out something new about OmniFocus that makes my life a bit easier.