Archive for the ‘technology’ Category

When Things Make You Feel Old.

April 15th, 2009

icon.pngI’d like to think that I’m ‘with it’. I’m on the Face­book and the Twit­ter, and am fairly active in both – I ‘get’ ’social media’, that’s what I’m saying. How­ever, with that said, I really think I finally feel like an old codger that just doesn’t under­stand the crazy kids and their new­fan­gled internets.

What has caused this epic change? Simply put, a new iPhone app called Birdhouse.

Now don’t get all ahead of your­selves here – it looks like a beau­ti­fully done app, and the web­site design, intro video and every­thing in between look to be fan­tas­ti­cally done. I don’t want to take that away from the folks who put this together (doesn’t hurt that Sand­wich Dynam­ics is an amaz­ing com­pany name, either).

The app simply exists to let you quickly enter in ‘tweet’ ideas, slowly refine them, rate them accord­ingly, then finally pub­lish the great ones, while still refin­ing the rest.

It’s just that I feel like they’re solv­ing a prob­lem that didn’t really exist until they showed up with the app. Again, maybe I’m an old­ster now and I just don’t ‘get’ it. Maybe true genius is doing exactly what I feel they did — cre­at­ing a solu­tion to an imag­i­nary prob­lem. I may or may not end up giving it a shot, as maybe I really am miss­ing out on some­thing. I just can’t shake that feel­ing that it makes no sense to me. Regard­less of how I feel, you should check it out for your­self — the intro video is quite good.

Anyway, stay off my lawn.

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Getting a Time Capsule Set Up

November 25th, 2008

Backing data up is important.

When you’re making lots of incre­men­tal changes over the course of a day, Apple’s Time Machine soft­ware can be a life saver. If at any moment you acci­den­tally delete a file, need to roll back a file, or oth­er­wise review a pre­vi­ous change, you’re able to do so via an … inter­est­ing … inter­face. Regard­less, it has saved me on numer­ous occasions.

Well, some­thing I noticed after a short while is that the Time Cap­sule back­ups tend to kill your net­work con­nec­tion when in use along with taking a long time when using apps that update fre­quently (iTunes library xml files, for exam­ple, are backed up nearly hourly as I listen to a lot of music while work­ing) . Also, once an hour might be too much for a lot of people. Unfor­tu­nately, Apple does not pro­vide an inter­face to make any changes other than ON & OFF. This makes it rather dif­fi­cult to find a good setup that works for each person’s indi­vid­ual needs.

That’s until I found an app called Time Machine Editor. It’s quite simple, and all it really allows you to do is change the fre­quency of your back­ups. You can set it to happen at hour inter­vals (1, 5, 10, 24, etc), or at a cer­tain time every day. I per­son­ally have set my iMac to backup right before lunch (11:30am) and right at the end of the work­day (6pm). This way, I will not be too far behind at any point, but I don’t have to deal with the increased net­work activ­ity or proces­sor usage.

So if you like Time Machine in theory but think that it’s more of a hassle than a help, Time Machine Editor is for you. I hope that with OS 10.6 we see some slight improve­ments to backup cus­tomiza­tion within the actual inter­face of Time Machine. For now, this is the best we can do.

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