Status-Q

A few months back I wrote about the importance of Google’s new support for CalDav, which allows you to edit and share your Google calendars in apps such as Apple’s iCal. At Camvine, since then, we’ve been managing our company calendars that way, and it’s worked very nicely, though it took a couple of minutes to set up iCal on each new machine because you had to enter complex URLs.

Now, I discover, there’s a utility called Calaboration to do it for you; much more convenient.

If you’re an iPhone/iTouch user… you can sync the calendars to the iPhone but it’s one-way only – you can’ t update them from there using the standard iPhone calendar app. However, you can of course use the web browser on the phone, which works quite nicely, or a third-party calendar utility like SaiSuke.

Here’s a simple keystroke that I find I’m using more and more:

Shift-Option-Cmd V

As I get older, I find it harder to remember long strings of modifier keys, so I think of this as ‘V with everything except control’!

This does a paste from the clipboard without any formatting. In days of yore, most cut-and-paste operations were just plain text anyway but, increasingly, I’m finding that when I copy text from a webpage to an email, from a document to a blog post, and so forth, it brings across too much of the formatting with it and I end up with chunks in the wrong font size, or with funny line spacing etc. Occasionally this is useful, but more often than not I just want the plain text, or I want to control the formatting carefully.

That’s when you need today’s mantra:
Cmd-C to copy, V with all but Control to paste!

Fred von Lohmann of the EFF:

Once again, thanks to DRM, a new product ends up less useful than the one it replaces. This time, it’s the new family of Apple Macbook laptop computers that gets the downgrade.

When it launched the new Macbooks, Apple announced that they would sport a new digital video output connector, known as Mini DisplayPort. What Apple failed to mention, however, is that those connectors allow movies studios to force the computer to authenticate any external monitor before allowing playback of programs purchased or rented from the iTunes Store (Microsoft’s Windows Vista does something similar). In other words, the HDTV monitor or projector that worked for you yesterday, won’t work with your new computer tomorrow if Hollywood has embedded a flag in the iTunes content you paid for.

This is a remarkably short-sighted move for both Apple and Hollywood. This punishes existing iTunes customers: several have reported that iTunes purchases that played on external monitors on their old Macbooks no longer will play on their new Macbooks. In other words, thanks to the Macbook “upgrade,” Apple just “downgraded” everyone’s previous investment in iTunes content (if we’ve told you once, we’ve told you a dozen times — when you buy DRMd content, the vendor can snatch your investment from you at any time).

Full post here.

No, this is nothing to do with politics. It only needs much smaller things to make me happy… like the fact that I have a new hard disk in my laptop.

When I bought my MacBook Pro – two or three years ago, now, just after they first came out – I thought that a 100G drive equalled lots of space. Since then, I have gradually moved my video-editing stuff onto external drives, then my music, then my photos, and then quite a few of the larger applications.

But, despite regular cleanups, I kept finding myself running out of space. It’s never really a good idea to run a filesystem with less than about 5-10% free, and I was regularly hovering around the 1% mark. So this week I called up the local Apple dealer, handed over a couple of hundred quid, and I now have 320GB to play with!

That doesn’t give me enough space to put everything back on the internal drive, but it’s a lot better than it was, and I can stop worrying about data corruption as my applications run out of swap space!

Aaaaah.

A tip, though – I has the OS installed on the new drive and used Apple’s excellent Migration Assistant to copy stuff from the old drive to the new system – this brings across your user accounts and data, applications, network settings etc – all very smoothly.

However, it’s really intended for those setting up a new machine and copying their data from an old one. As such, it doesn’t assume that you have a licence on the new machine for any Apple pro apps – Final Cut, Aperture, Logic Pro etc. It copies the apps, but not the licences. So if you use this system to migrate to a new drive, remember that you’ll need those serial numbers handy afterwards!

If you use Apple’s wonderful Time Machine backup system, the best thing to do is to give it a hard disk of its own, or a partition of its own, because it tends to grow over time to fill the space available, and trimming it later is not easy.

I’ve got about 3TB of space on my Drobo, and I don’t want it all used for TM, but partitioning is a bit of a nuisance. Fortunately, there’s a free tool you can download from Drobo called Time Tamer, which you can use for any large disk, and which will limit your TM backup space to twice the size of your internal hard drive.

For those of you who want more control and who are interested in what’s happening under the bonnet, though, you can do this yourself. It involves creating a sparse disk image file with the right characteristics and name. TM will then use that instead of creating its own folder structure, and you can limit the size to which the sparse image will grow.

Here’s my command line:

hdiutil create -size 400g -fs HFS+J -volname "TM-backup-of-tafelberg" /Volumes/Drobo/tafelberg_0016cb9125cf.sparsebundle


• 400g is the max amount of space I want it to take – the max size of the sparse image.
• tafelberg is the name of my machine
• Drobo is the name of the hard disk I’m using
• 0016cb9125cf is the MAC address of my machine’s ethernet port

This creates a sparse image on the disk called, in my case, tafelberg_0016cb9125cf.sparsebundle.
If you switch off Time Machine, move, rename or delete any Backups.backupdb folder that TM may have created there, run an appropriately modified version of this command, and then switch TM back on and select the original disk as the one to use, TM should notice this image and use it to store the backups.

I guess you’ll know if it worked if TM doesn’t create Backups.backupdb again at the top level of the disk!

Followup: Mmm. I found that, when I used this method, and then went into Time Machine, I didn’t get the pretty windows disappearing into the past – it just showed Today. If I mounted the image as a drive, however, the backups seemed to be there and I could restore from them. The moral being that you should check that restoring works for you too if you use this method!

If you’ve upgraded to iTunes 8, but not actually watched Steve Jobs’ keynote or listened to lots of Mac podcasts, it may be easy to miss the best bit of the ‘Genius’ feature. The obvious bit – the Genius sidebar, shows you all the music you can buy at the iTunes store that might coincide with your tastes.

The more subtle bit is the Genius Playlist, which appears with your other playlists on the left hand side. If you select a song in your collection and then click the little ‘genius’ button at the bottom right, this playlist will populated with that song and a selection of your music that should go with it.

On my brief experiments, it seems rather good. The things you can do when you can draw on millions of users’ data…