iPod touch as PDA: milestone

This will be of little interest to anyone, other than as a signal that my iPod touch-as-PDA experiment is really working out: I've actually deleted almost all of the music I had been carrying on my iPod touch because I was running out of space for more important things. That is, I no longer really consider it an iPod, or, at least, I don't consider music storage to be its primary function. My entire music collection has nudged over 22G, and with a mere 32G available on the iPod touch, I had been finding it a squeeze to allocate the remaining 10G as I wanted. I have almost 50 applications installed now (many of which are frivolous, but some of which are essential). Between those and my new-found addiction to downloading television episodes from the iTunes Store (just finished season two of The Wire), something had to give. It was the music. The iPod touch is less like a music player and more like a hand-held computer for me.

We have the technology

Just scrolling the Snow Leopard Enhancements and Refinements page, and I'm stopped in my tracks by the first section on Finder:

[When attempting to eject an external disk,] improved dialogs tell you which applications are using the drive so you know what to close in order to safely disconnect your drive.

Wow—you mean we have the technology for that now? Outstanding.

Now, without the sarcasm, I can't believe this qualifies for front page news on Snow Leopard. Mac OS X's error dialogs are regularly woeful, and this kind of sloppy user interface design (telling the user that something is preventing a disk from being removed, but not telling them what) should have been corrected years ago. It's neither an "enhancement", nor a "refinement", it's an "embarrassingly basic user interface deficiency that should have been fixed by now".

Installing a new font

I had recently read a post entitled “Top 10 Programming Fonts”, via Daring Fireball. I figured I would try out the number one font, Inconsolata, for Java editing in Eclipse. Instant problem: I had never installed a new font in OS X before, and had no idea how.

I hit the Quicksilver hotkey and typed ‘font’—the first match was Font Book, and that looked promising. I downloaded Inconsolata in Open Type format, selected File > Add Fonts... in Font Book, and pointed the dialog at the downloaded Open Type file. Done.

By default, the font is installed for the current user only, but there's a preference to allow installing a new system-wide font. Back over in Eclipse, Inconsolata now shows up in the font selection dialog. I'm currently trying it out. Initial impression: looks nice.

Time Machine broken again

My latest Time Machine saga apparently started 12 days ago, though I wasn't aware of it until yesterday, when a helpful dialog popped up to tell me that a Time Machine backup of my MacBook Pro hadn't occurred in 11 days. Outstanding.

When I got home last night, I figured I would manually start a backup and let it run for as long as it took. Being the expert in Time Machine failure that I am, I knew that interrupting backups by putting the machine to sleep seems to confuse the whole process, and maybe I just hadn't had the machine awake enough within WiFi range of the Time Capsule recently. I started the backup, and we sat through a whole lot of "preparing". In fact, so much preparing that I fired up the Console about an hour later:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

"Well, we don't want to rush the index," I thought. "If the index is not ready, I can wait." At about the two hour mark, I set the energy saver preferences to keep the machine awake all night, and went to bed.

Almost 12 hours later, the console was reading:

... /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd[4558]
Waiting for index to be ready (905 > 0)

At that point I had to go to work, so I shut down yet another backup and took off. It's Friday now, so I guess plan B is to start another backup when I get home this afternoon, which can potentially run for about 60 hours before I need to interrupt it again.

My take on the issue is this: if your backup software needs more than 12 hours to decide what it needs to backup from a 160G disk, then your backup software is broken. It's a testament to the level of Mac Fanboy status I have achieved that I even persevere with Time Machine. The old Unix Me would have deleted this junk months ago.

iTunes: a laugh a minute

When I download something from the iTunes Store, iTunes periodically offers to backup all my purchases. Just got the offer now, and I figured, "Sure—I have a terabyte of portable disk sitting on top of my Mac Pro. Why not?" Then I get this:

Oh iTunes, you're so funny. Backup to CDs or DVDs? What century is it?

Time Capsule user interface annoyances

I just got home to find my Time Capsule's status LED flashing yellow. This is a story of two problems with the Time Capsule user interface.

If I read the Time Capsule manual at all, it was many months ago. I can't remember what ‘flashing yellow LED’ means, but given that it spends 99% of its time solid green, I figure green = good, and yellow = bad. I've been an Apple user for some four years now, so I'm with the program. Troubled by the LED's flashing yellowness, I fired up AirPort Utility. There was, in fact, no problem at all—there just happened to be a firmware update available. Firmware updated, Time Capsule reset, and the LED is now a comforting solid green. This strikes me as an awful way to signal the availability of new firmware. Surely this could be integrated into the system-wide Software Update facility.

In any case, the hilarity did not end there. Time Machine was running a backup during the update, but the Time Capsule apparently made no attempt to terminate that gracefully. While the Time Capsule rebooted after the update, Time Machine displayed an error dialog, and the backup failed. For a piece of hardware that's sold specifically to work with a piece of software, this complete lack of integration is disappointing.

Amazon brings Kindle to iPhone, just not to Australia

This sounds cool. Naturally, this is the reality: