Well. Some of us already have our kids back in school, and some don’t. Some won’t this year, but the advice here applies to a lot of people wanting to lock down their laptops a little better for public use.
One word: Amen
On an iPhone related note, there is now an app in the iPhone app store that allows you to post Worspress-based blog entries and edit them on your iPhone or iPod touch.
One of the new features that has been added that’s a no-brainer in retrospect (though none of my previous phones had it) is an ability to take screenshots of your iPhone screen. This means documenting iPhone features, showing off how cool your game looks, etc. all are much easier to do.
This also makes it very easy to note one thing that many people “know” but don’t give much thought to. If your website is Flash heavy, or worse, almost exclusively Flash, here’s what it looks like to an iPhone:
That little blue building block? That’s the “I don’t know how to play this content” icon where a website decided to have everything Flash-driven.
Yes it’s true that Google has arranged with Adobe to index flash files. This mitigates, but does not eliminate the argument that Flash-heavy content hurts your search rankings, even in Google. Nevertheless, creating Flash-heavy sites, especially sites that have no easy way to bypass the Flash, means that anyone without access to a full desktop is unlikely to dig up any useful information about your company, such as phone numbers to contact you.
Just a thought.
I’ve seen this several places now but the best summary is at Ars Technica. I’ve heard plenty of people say the naysaying was just as bad when XP was introduced. Well, it was pretty bad, but not this bad. Not “We’re trying to figure out ways to sell Windows 2000 with new computers because people just want to avoid Vista and many of the businesses with custom-built apps won’t certify them on Vista without a lot more time stomping bugs” bad.
Ars Technica, the source of many fine articles related to computers, just published an excellent little primer on how to keep your computer secure. It includes information for Linux and Mac users as well.
I’ll admit. Some of my home stereo gear is old. As in better than fifteen years old. So?
It works.
It also makes no difference to what I’m about to discuss, which is: It is wayyyy too complicated for normal people (non-technical adults who are not gadget-geeks of some sort) to work their TV / home theater setup.
Case in point: Our widescreen gets cable piped directly in. It also gets the DVD player and VCR piped directly in, and echoes the sound out to the surround sound receiver.
So far so good. Unless I really want to listen to my iTunes library I never, ever change my stereo inputs. Turn on the TV and select the right input and *bam* there ya are. TV goodness.
But, we stumble into the first conceptual obstacle. You see, the TV remote, like many remotes supplied these days, is a universal remote. This means it’s universally useless for anything except perhaps the TV because the one critical feature you need for any other device (separate play-pause buttons, forex), are just not included on the remote surface, and the TV is complicated enough that little widdy biddy buttons require you to squint through bleary eyes.
The conceptual problem comes when Unsuspecting Normal Average Person with a Life picks up the remote, and, following your instructions turns on the TV and the stereo and cannot get it to change from the TV tuner.
Someone, recently handling the remote, must have hit the “dvd” button, and so neither the remote nor the TV care that you are mashing down the “source” button to change the input. The geeks response, knowing that the remote has multiple modes, will be to switch the remote back to TV mode.
This is NOT intuitively obvious to the normal average person. I’ll have to look at getting one of the programmable Logitech remotes because I’ve been told they actually really work - and divide up the settings by what you’re doing rather than by what device you need to control at the moment. The upshot is if you’re “watching a DVD” it controls the stereo volume via the volume buttons, sets the TV to the input designated as “DVD”, and the play controls manage the DVD player - all without you constantly switching modes.
The next common bugaboo, and one I’ll fix at my house with a little piece of RCA patch cable, is the famous “why is there no sound?” Receivers and pre-amps have many input selections. When my Onkyo was made, equalizers were common, and commonly hooked up at the in and out ports for “tape 2″ (in case you actually bought two separate tape decks). For the EQ to do it’s job the receiver had to route sound back out from its selected input via the tape 2 “record/out” jacks, and listen to the tape 2 input no matter what the original source was.
Needless to say, if you don’t have an EQ or a second tape deck there are probably no cables there. The secondary consequence is that accidentally turning on “Tape 2″ effectively mutes your stereo, with very little indication that it’s even in Tape 2 mode as you’ll still see the input for “Tape 1″ or “Video 1″, etc.
I’ve had backup means in place before Leopard came out. Specifically, a snapshot based setup using rsync and hard links on my linux box. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been half as useful as time machine - if for no other reason than the ability to do bare metal restores.
I’ve had to do them twice now.
The first time was when my laptop was dropped shortly after closing the lid while still writing out. The drive had to be replaced and restored from an external TM backup. I’m writing this on it now, as a matter of fact.
The second time was the other day - discovering my desktop hung up (which has effectively become a household media server and sandboxed surfstation for the kids). Turns out the boot drive was suffering from a string of communications errors, though the diagnostics and file repair programs said everything was fine. One trip to Staples and a few hours later and I had a restored desktop.
I’ll say it now. It isn’t perfect. Super Duper would have allowed me to have a bootable replica of the entire drive that I could have switched to and continued to work off of. It would have been just as effective for a bare metal restore if that had been needed. I’m a huge fan of super duper.
What SD doesn’t do is snapshots. Changes in files overwrite old files. Deleted files are never erased and just accumulate. There is effectively no way to go back and recover the email, file, picture, or system state that existed at time x before you accidentally made the wrong change and hit “save”.
Ideally, I’d use both.
edit: cut down next-to-last paragraph to save space and clarify meaning.
Over the years I’ve delved into the Apple Interface guidelines a few times. While somewhat geeky reading, it’s also not as dry and boring as you’d expect, and lays out what is expected of a “mac-like” app. So it was nice to see a good article on exactly what the HIG was for, and why it is still relevant.
The compatibility of the text editor with Safari has simply grown by leaps and bounds.
