Help, My Hard Drive is Full! - TechDigs.net

One of my ongoing rants on MacBreak Weekly revolves around how hard I've found it to keep up with the spiraling need for responsible personal backup. Photos, movies, audio, documents, you name it. As Mark Pilgrim asked last May, "How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years?" And don't get me started on media rotation and offsite copies. The mind boggles. I mean, remember when a shoebox full of Zip disks and a copy of Retrospect was all you needed? Good times.

I don't have the long-term solution I'm after just yet (although, I sometimes think Amazon S3 is heading us in the right direction), but for the middle-term, my call for help has been answered handsomely by Greg Keene of TechDigs, who's put together a detailed breakdown on how he wires things together around his Infrant ReadyNAS NV (amzn) -- it's Mac-friendly, Raid 5-able, and has an assload of configurable options.

Greg lays out the problem he's trying to solve:

Unsanity.org: Love Tropicana: The Fix for securityd Eatings Gobs of Ram When Updating Keychain Entries

For the past few months, I've suffered the most vexing and stubborn OS X problem I've ever had to confront. Detailed in this Apple.com forum thread, the short version is that something with my Keychain went haywire somewhere, and any time I had to reauthorize an application's access to the Keychain, the securityd process would spin off into the stratosphere, grabbing an enormous amount of RAM, virtually freezing my Mac, and never letting go until I did a full-on, old-school restart (CONTROL-COMMAND-POWER). This was frustrating.

In addition to leaving me without NetNewsWire, OmniWeb, and several other of my Top 20 apps, I lost reliable access to Transmit, which for me is like losing a fingertip or something.

I'll save you the ridiculous amount of rubber chicken waving (and Keychain item decimation) that ensued, and will just cut to the solution, which was provided by Unsanity's Rosyna.

In order to fix this problem if you are having it, just open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal) and type:

sudo mv /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase /var/db/CodeEquivalenceDatabase.old

or

open /var/db (and then manually move CodeEquivalenceDatabase to the trash, if you can).

I don't know precisely how or why this works (short answer: "file corruption bad"), and I cannot assure you that it will not, in your own usage, cause Big Problems™. But it worked for me, I have my apps back, and now I'm the happiest boy in the world. May Google bring others to the solution as well.

Many thanks to Rosyna, who is so going to get a present for this.

Literature and Latte - Scrivener

Scrivener, a full-featured writing program that I've been raving about a lot lately on MacBreak Weekly, has now reached the 1.0 milestone and is available for purchase from Literature and Latte. Scrivener's product page has also been updated with a terrific explanation of why this app feels so different.

Personally, I like the excellent fullscreen mode, built-in (round-trip) outliner, tricked-out Inspector, and all-in-one form factor, but my favorite feature (which can be hard to explain without actually using the app for yourself) is Scrivener's use of the index card and corkboard metaphor.

If you write like I do (and I pray that you do not), you have a messy approach to drafting that is iterative, intuitive, and far from linear. You do a brain dump, then type a little, then research a little, then type a little more, then move a bunch of stuff around, then groan aloud, then 80% start over and so on until something is done. Yes, it would be more tidy if we all followed the mandate of our elementary school teachers and wrote perfect 5-paragraph essays straight from a completed outline. But, such is life. And Scrivener seems to get that.

Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine

This enjoyable article on burnout includes a bit that I love (and sympathize with):

Woo hoo. Re: An appendix to the principles of Jewish Buddhism. Saying hi. Re: Hey pal. Burnout. WHEN are we eating? Open Enrollment Info. Quick q. Arrrrrrrrrrgh.

You are looking at nine e-mail subject lines I received in a one-hour period last week. It was then that I realized I answer an e-mail once every 6.66 minutes. The very thought of committing this fact to paper has kept me crippled for several seconds. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing my boss should know.

One has to wonder whether the developments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse. First, the obvious: With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys (or “CrackBerrys”—the argot here seems extremely apt), and other bits of high-speed doodadry, it has become virtually impossible, in senses both literal and metaphorical, to unplug from our jobs. As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.

I suspect that children will eventually support some kind of thin-client email-to-affection gateway. From an evolutionary standpoint, it may be the only solution that scales.

Actiontastic 0.9 gets iCal sync support

Tim at Hawk Wings points out that Actiontastic .9 now supports Sync Services, making it easy to move your stuff to iCal, .Mac, as well as (previously added) your iPod.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time with Actiontastic, but I admire its lean approach to task work (arguably a bit too lean for some folks). Still, I always feel like the less you have to fiddle with, the more likely you may be to actually do the stuff on your list.

Also, making sync seamless and reliable is clearly something Mac users are coming to expect in most every app where it's practical. Plus, of course, it works with Quicksilver, and there's nothing wrong with that.

More on Actiontastic here.

Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse

There’s as rich a body of literature about (and tools for) Productivity as most any subject you can imagine.

To avoid becoming an unproductive dilettante, make sure your practice of Productivity always takes precedence over your talmudic scholarship on the subject.

AKA: All the reading in the world won’t teach you as much as your first french kiss.

(Running Time: 03:47)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

Here are the final 5 episodes of MacBreak I reported from the Macworld Expo floor this week:

• MacBreak 59 Macworld 2007: Show Floor Tour de Force - (MOV) - 11:38 - "Alex and Merlin round out our coverage from the Macworld 2007 expo."
• MacBreak 57 Macworld 2007: MemoryMiner - (MOV) - 08:01 - "Merlin interviews the creators of MemoryMiner."
• MacBreak 56 Macworld 2007: Macworld with Merlin, cont'd. - (MOV) - 11:02 - "Merlin continues his tour of the show floor, speaking with Dan Moren from MacUser, Brian Johnson from Microsoft and indulging in his most relaxing interview."
• MacBreak 54 Macworld 2007: Bare Bones Software - (MOV) - 09:23 - "Merlin chats with the folks at Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit and Yojimbo."
• MacBreak 53 Macworld 2007: Cocoalicious - (MOV) - 05:11 - "Merlin speaks to the developer of cocoalicious about his del.icio.us client and the software possibilities of the new iPhone."

Here are the previous 4 segments and here's a pointer to all of MacBreak's Macworld coverage.

Thanks to everybody at Pixel Corps who put this together, and most special thanks to everyone who talked with us, came to the meetups, or just said hi on the show floor. It was a really fun week for me.

You can ensure you never miss an episode of MacBreak by subscribing for free.

Meeting Tip: Learning Names | Gurno.com

As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam's idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc. Adam writes:

Step 1 - Reconnoiter

Draw a quick map of the table/layout of the meeting. Place yourself on it, to give yourself a reference point.

Step 2: The Combatants

As people introduce themselves around the table, fill them in. If you feel last names are necessary add those too, but don't do it at the expense of writing down someone else's name. You can guess at the last names later. If you miss one, leave it blank and fill it in as soon as you can - if someone else refers to them, etc, etc.

A few more of my MacBreak segments from the Macworld Expo floor are now available for download:

• MacBreak 51 Macworld 2007: The Omni Group - (MOV) - 8:03 - "Merlin chats with Ken Case from the Omni Group about their products and the application development possibilities for the iPhone."
• MacBreak 50 Macworld 2007: MacTank - (MOV) - 07:44 - "Merlin chats with the developers of MailTank and MailTemplate."
• MacBreak 49 Macworld 2007: AppZapper, Pzziz and Cha-Ching - (MOV) - 8:58 - "Leo and Merlin continue their tour of 'Tiny Town', visiting with the makers of Cha-Ching, Pzziz and AppZapper."
• MacBreak Macworld 2007: Flip4Mac - (MOV) - 5:59 - "Leo and Merlin chat with the makers of the Flip4Mac suite of digital media tools."

More episodes coming later today. Never miss an episode of MacBreak by subscribing for free.

Two recent articles in the New York Times would seem to put to rest -- at least for the foreseeable future -- any hopes or speculation that the new iPhone will be allowed (nb: I did not say able) to run third-party OS X applications (previously: 43F Podcast: Snell & Gruber on iPhone applications and Let OS X developers at the iPhone. Please.)

Regrettably, the word on this one comes directly from the Steve's mouth (2007-01-12):

“We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”

The iPhone model, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.

“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”

David Pogue's seemingly exhaustive iPhone FAQ also underscores what we'd been hearing via these drams of dolor (2007-01-11):

Can it run Mac OS X programs? –No.

Can I add new programs to it? –No. Apple wants to control the look and feel and behavior of every aspect of the phone.

Well, there you go. Apple appears to be on the path to providing its iPhone customers with a pantry full of excruciatingly beautiful crockery and flatware that may never be set down for chow. (But you can bet we'll always know it's there -- even while we're eating takeout with our assigned spoons).

Spectators at the iPhone Display
Originally uploaded by x180.

Wonderful photo by Duncan.

Sixfoot6 Archives: 30 Things the iPhone Could Do That You Haven't Thought of Yet

Ryan's list contains a lot of the tear-inducingly sexy fantasies that were going through my own mind on Tuesday morning when we all heard that the iPhone was going to run OS X.

Like a lot of my friends, I (probably naively) took the announcement to mean that, as on my own Mac, I'd be able to install Cocoa applications built to take advantage of announced features like WebKit, Core Animation, and so on. Sure, given the foreseeable hardware limitations, these wouldn't be the exact applications that we're each running on our MacBooks today, but, hell, I'd take "OmniOutliner Mobile" or "iTerm Lite" or "Textmate for iPhone" in a heartbeat. No question.

Yesterday morning, though, I started to hear rumbles about the "inability for users to install additional applications of their choosing." And then later, after Brian from Gizmodo got a hands-on demo along with a sit-down with official Apple honchos, he noted...

It isn't OS X proper, as you'd expect. And like an iPod, it won't be an open system that people can develop for. Remember, this is both an iPod and a Phone.

...and I died a little inside.

Jason Snell and John Gruber on iPhone applications

Merlin talks with MacWorld Magazine’s Jason Snell and DaringFireball.net’s John Gruber about the likely future of applications for the recently announced iPhone. Who will be allowed to play? How does it affect the ostensible competition? Will this end up feeling more like a phone with an iPod, a Mac with a phone, or something altogether different? (5:48)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

MacBreak

Check back throughout the week for MacBreak's ongoing coverage of Macworld 2007 in San Francisco.

• MacBreak Macworld 2007: Keynote Rundown - In this first segment, Leo, Alex, and I review the major announcements of the keynote, including, of course, the iPhone and Apple TV

iPhone size comparison
Originally uploaded by freshyill.

Slenderlicious.

Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote

Apple - iPhone

Wow. Everyone here in the MacBreak war room is still perspiring as we let it all sink in. OS X. On your phone. Damn.

So what do you guys think about Steve's announcements? What surprised you? What else do you wish you'd heard? What do you think it will mean to have running OS X on your mobile phone?

Upcoming.org: MacBreak Weekly Live @ 21st Amendment at 21st Amendment (Tuesday, January 9, 2007)

Directions to 21A, from Moscone Center

Just a reminder that tonight's live taping of MacBreak Weekly takes place at 21st Amendment starting at 6pm. If you're planning to come to the taping, my advice is to get there early, because we're anticipating a capacity audience (that's a big reason everyone agreed it was better not to do this event at the Apple Store on Steve Day).

Leo, Alex, Scott, and I will be discussing today's announcements and may even have some guests.

A propos of nothing, I will also take this opportunity to remind Mr. Bourne of his (often repeated) promise to buy everyone on MBW an iPhone on the day that they come out. Just saying.

If you come out tonight or see me on the Macworld show floor with MacBreak today, please say hi and introduce yourself.

OmniFocus Sneak Preview - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Dan Lurie at TUAW has detailed notes on the OmniFocus Meetup yesterday at the Apple Store.

• OmniFocus, unlike its predecessor KinklessGTD will feature an instant data propagation across the app, thus doing away with the need for a "sync button," and ensuring your data is always where you expect it to be.
• OmniFocus will have a simpler and more streamlined interface than OmniOutliner, on which KGTD was built.
• Users will be able to view multiple or individual projects and contexts in either a single window or multiple separate windows.
• OmniFocus will support existing KGTD QuickSilver inbox-entry actions.
• OmniFocus will also feature a standalone proprietary quick-entry method via keystroke, similar to Yojimbo.
• Future versions will support user definable smart folders.
• The first version of OmniFocus will not require 10.5 Leopard, but all following versions will due to the use of Leopard only technologies.
• Like KGTD, OmniFocus will support syncing with portable devices through iCal.
• OmniFocus will be fully applescriptable.
• Future versions will support integration with OmniPlan.
• Future versions will support universal action creation from other applications (such as turning an email message or iCal to-do into an action).
• Future versions will support attaching or tying of files to actions and projects.
• OmniGroup is planning to release OmniFocus within the next few months.

It was great to hear Ken lay out OmniGroup's plans and progress on the Kinkless replacement. Thanks much to everyone who showed up yesterday.

Of all the speculation and Steve-watching over the past few weeks, the recent chatter about an Apple "nano-computer" may be the most interesting and thought-provoking of the bunch.

Bob Snow writes:

I think Apple will introduce a nano-computer, masquerading as a smart-phone . Basically a tablet computer the size of a Treo or Blackberry with a far more clever input method, full face screen and some version of iLife running on it. Ideally it would be a stand alone wireless nano-computer running OS X. Think of all the capabilities of a MacBook combined with a phone...

Current technology would of course make this computer a brick, much larger than a Zune and more expensive than a MacBook. The Apple genius-phone will have to point the way to such a device with a mobile version of OS X and iLife. Much of your data and the programs that manipulate it might be located on the internet. Strip down the memory. Even sync it with your computer rather than replace your computer. Whatever it takes to put a placeholder out there to position Apple for the coming revolution. It might take a serious partnership with Google to pull this off. Phone service providers be damned.

And here I was conservatively predicting/begging-for (@00:51:04) a 12” MacBook Pro by next year. Always thinking too small big. Now I want me the notional MacBook Nano.

So, what's your guess? What will Steve's E-ticket ride be at Macworld this year?

An E-Tool Bill of Rights

With the surfeit of inbound communication unleashed by our always-on culture, life balance pundit Joe Robinson thinks it's time to get constitutional about our rights as overwhelmed e-citizens. I can definitely get behind a couple of the "articles" he's laid out:

In the spirit of Madison and Jefferson, it's time to reclaim liberty, not to mention productivity, with some boundary setting and rules. It's time to redraw the line between work and home, and between legitimate office communications and junk, with an E-Tool Bill of Rights...

Article 3: The people shall have the right to switch off email notification and other noisemakers and instead check messages at designated times to prevent attention deficit...

Article 4: There shall be no requirement of immediate response to messaging, unless urgency is determined.

Your mileage, like my own, will vary on some of these, but I'm always happy to see this thread of conversation picked up; I regret that we still have a ways to go before some of these would be ratified by the extant electronic body politic.

[ Thanks, barrett55 ]

MWSF Drinking Game 2007
Originally uploaded by World Leader Pretend1.

We'll all be so drunk by 11am tomorrow.

[via Digg]

18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work

In this post from last August, Dave Cheong pointed out some of the hazards of working in a cube farm, and he proposes some handy tips for wresting back your attention from a room full of interruptions and distractions. I think a few of these tips are big winners.

Allocate time slots colleagues can interrupt you...Instead of having people stop by your desk every 10 mins and asking you questions, let them know of a time in the day, say between 2-4pm you can be interrupted. At all other times, you can really get some work done...

Apply time boxing...Instead of working at something till it is done, try working on it for a limited period, say 30 mins. By that time, the task is either completed or you allocate another time slot, perhaps in another day, to pick it up again...

Find the best time to do repetitive and boring tasks...For example, I’m more alert at the start of the day, so it’s better to work on things which require brain power early. Working on boring tasks that can be done via auto-pilot are better left towards the end of the day when I’m usually tired.

I realize that many of these ideas assume a lot of autonomy and control over your work day as well as how you conduct it -- obviously not every career is conducive to the enforcement of what amounts to "office hours" -- but I think that's kind of the point as well as the irony and the big, bottom-line challenge.

MacBreak 38: Path Finder

As promised, here's the latest video podcast episode of MacBreak, in which Leo and I have a look at Path Finder, an application by Cocoatech that (in my opinion) handsomely compensates for many of the deficits in the current OS X Finder. It also has a ton of cool features, preferences, and geegaws that most any Mac nerd will love.

New to me in this episode: according to Leo, Woz (cough) likes Path Finder, too. Cool!

Finally, here's some earlier coverage of Path Finder on 43f.

Direct downloads of Episode 38:

• Standard video (450p)
• HD version (1080p)

Subscribe to MacBreak for free

• iPod version (Subscribe in iTunes)
• 1080p (HD) version