Apple

Here’s a nice article on medical software available on the Mac:

Mac EMR Software | A Guide to Medical Software for Apple Computers.

How I set up a new Mac | Mac OS X | Macworld.

Really liking the iPad so far. it’s a perfect fit between a cellphone and a laptop (but not replacing either). One annoyance is that it’s a bit of a chore to get some videos into the ipad. For example, I use Aperture to manage my photos and home movies, and Aperture sync to the iPad works very well. But movies in the photo albums that I want to sync to the iPad don’t show up because the are .mov files and the iPad doesn’t play those.

So I have to go through a couple of extra steps. These steps work for DVD’s ripped to my computer to. Start with any video file, and use Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/) to reformat the videos. Note that Handbrake is really free, and not just a free download with a required payment as with many other solutions to this problem.

Within Handbrake I’ve created a set of settings that work with the iPad, and stored those into a preset. So if I want to format a video for my iPhone I can select that preset, and likewise for the iPad. The settings are on the web but if you can’t track them down get in touch and I’ll send you the details.

Except for the annoyance of the extra couple of steps, this works very well and I get very high res video into my iPad.

Well, it’s been a while since I blogged here. Mostly I’m posting at twitter, and “officially” blogging at my company’s site – ctistrategy.com.

Still though there are things that don’t fit in twitter and aren’t appropriate for my company site, and I should talk about them here… and I will.

This time I want to describe a nightmare I had (unfortunately not while sleeping) and the solution.

On my Mac Pro, I accidentally deleted an important RAID set. I actually have multiple RAID sets. I have a “production” one and a “backup” one, as well as an off-site one in case of disaster. I just do RAID-0 (striping) for performance, figuring with the multiple copies I can recovery (almost) all of the files I need. I keep the production and backup disks synchronized via a great program called “superflexiblesynchonizer”. I’ve tried many and this one actually works.

Further, the important day-to-day stuff I work on is stored in a separate, encrypted, disk image. This Mac feature is very nice. Using “disk utility”, you can create an encrypted disk image. Mount that image up and give a password to use (and create) files there. Then unmount it when done returning the files to their encrypted container. I synchronize that file’s contents to my MacBook Pro. So essentially I have 4 copies of my most important content, and three copies of the other content (photos, music, movies, etc). That certainly seems like a nice safe way to store my files… Except that the off-site copy is frequently multiple months out of date. And when I need to expand the storage in my Mac Pro, I usually have to delete a RAID set, rebuild it on bigger disks, and recopy the data – leaving me a bit vulnerable (or at least leaving my data vulnerable during those procedures.

Well, I did such a rebuild, but during the procedure somehow deleted my backup RAID group and my primary one. Fortunately I had my off-site still but I had lots of photos, songs, etc, not stored in that off-site. There is no official way to recover a deleted RAID set on the Mac. I called Apple support and they essentially said “you are out of luck”. I did more research and found some expensive services that would accept shipment of the disks in question, muck with them for an indeterminate amount of time, and return them, either fixed or broken (expensive charge incurred regardless).

Finally I found a forum where someone mentioned that a company called SoftRAID might be able to solve the problem. SoftRAID makes RAID software (essentially a better version of software RAID to replace using the RAID built into the Mac and usable via “disk utility”). But in doing that their software also can convert Apple software RAID to their RAID structures, so they know how Apple RAID works. Low and behold, after a few exchanges of email and configuration files, they sent me some blocks to write over my deleted RAID disks, recreating the RAID structures there. I happily paid them their modest fee (which included a license for their software) and now I’m very happily running their RAID software with my recovered RAID sets. Phew! Very glad I found them and they did a great job getting my RAID set back. Now not to delete anything ever again!

Just upgraded my macbook pro with a newly-available 500GB 2.5″ SATA 7200 RPM drive. It was simple and quick and now I have more, fast space on my internal hard drive.

Here are the steps:
- Purchase the drive – I got mine from macsales.com otherwise known as Other World Computing.
- Attach the new drive as an external drive in an external chassis. Fortunately I already had one, but OWC also sells those. Something like this would do the trick. (Note that Firewire is faster than USB but that both would work.)
- Use Disk Utility (it comes with Mac OS) to format the new drive. I chose partition-> 1 partition, Mac OS X Extended (Journaled), then pushed the “options” button and chose “GUID Partition Table” as this is an Intel-based Macbook.
- Use Disk Utility to copy the internal drive to the new external drive via the “Restore” option along the top of the main window. This step took ~2 hours using FW400, copying about 200GB of content from the old disk to the new.
- Halt the system, remove the old hard drive and replace it with the new drive. Fortunately on the new MacBook Pros, this is easy. The old systems were challenging to get into and to change disks in. Although again OWC has the directions.
- Boot the new system and revel in its speed and free space!

Thanks to Becoming a Computer Technician for picking my blog as something useful to Mac users. I guess that means I should update my “Best Mac Resources” page – it’s sorely in need of one.

Picked up my first iphone on Friday. My friend Mark and I avoided lines by calling ahead to check status and wait time at a few stores, and arriving at the store late afternoon. In Hingham, MA, we waited only a couple of minutes before having a sales rep help us to our new phones.

Many great things to appreciate about the phone, especially the screen and the (many, mostly) great applications. Some things people complain about I find to be very nice. The camera quality seems to be very good, but maybe as the lens gets some wear and tear the quality will decrease.

Fun applications so far include evernote (my new favorite journaling software), sketches, save benjis, vicinity, weatherbug, google, bloomberg, pcalc, and the built in GPS.  And the UI is tremendous.

But battery life is a problem.  To start, I turned everything on – bluetooth, wifi, 3G, and push email from exchange. This is the way I’d prefer to run so I figured I should give it a try. About 5 hours later, with fairly light phone use, the battery was dead.  Turned off Wifi and (unscientifically) battery life wasn’t much better. Then 3G, and again battery seemed to be draining quickly. Then found a web site talking about how “push” email is a big battery drainer. Tried resetting that to “pull” mode – i.e. the phone will connect periodically to the email (calendar, contact) servers and download changes, rather than getting the changes as they happen. If that greatly increases battery life I’ll try turning on the other services and see if I can get closes to connectivity nirvana or if I’ll have to run lean and mean.  I’ll report back with the results.

UPDATE:

I’m now happy with the battery life. It’s at least as good as my old phone – the Verizon XV6800 smartphone. The key is to turn off “push” synchronization. Instead I get updates to Exchange every 30 minutes or whenever I launch the mail / calendar / contact iPhone applications.  I’ve left 3G and wireless on, used the phone a reasonable amount from 9am to midnight without charging it, and still had 25% battery life left.  I have cycled the battery charge a few times which usually also helps battery life.

The current status of my life with iPhone:

Apps do occasionally crash – I chalk this up to version 1.0 of the API and the apps.

Occasionally (once every other day?) the phone will crash when running an app. Note that all the problems are with 3rd party apps, never (so far) the native Apple apps.

UI, location services, look and feel are all great.

Can’t charge the phone in any of my vehicles via the dock connector to my sound systems – at least I can listen to my iPod content though!  This is a bit aggravating. I can charge via a cigarette lighter adapter though, and bought a “Kensington mini battery pack and charger” external battery for emergency use (that works well so far), so not a huge issue. It will be an issue when I finally give in and update my ipod car adapters though (once compatible ones are out) because those are expensive.

Syncing takes a loooong time (full backup each time the iphone is connected to the computer) if left to its own devices. I found that (if I don’t want the backup) just hit the little “x” in the syncing status at the top of itunes, and then itunes will move on to the other aspects of syncing (i.e. loading new apps, podcasts, music). At night I’ll let a full sync run but during the day I just want the contents updated…

Favorite apps: bloomberg, weatherbug, pccalc, shazam, evernote, save benjis, where, yelp, boxoffice, twinkle, sportstap, mlb.com at bat, pandora, sketches, ereader, airme, and some games. Very nice!