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Restoring iPhoto from a Time Machine Backup

Posted on April 20, 2010

I am doing my first even restore from a Time Machine backup.

The reason for the restore is that I messed up my MacBook iPhoto library trying to merge it with the one from my Mac Mini. I was using iPhoto Library Manager and instead of it following my instructions of “Do Not Duplicate” it duplicated. That caused my iPhoto library to double in size and actually completely fill up my hard drive.

To rectify the situation I copied the bloated library to an external hard drive then deleted my local copy. From there I did a restore from Time Machine to the day before this escapade started.

This situation has really got me thinking on how I can better manage my photos between the two computers. Maybe Dropbox and and Google Picasa are in order here.

Note: After a quick Google search it seems that there is a setting in the iPhoto Library Manager that if not checked WILL duplicate the photos even if you check not to in iPhoto itself. I have no idea why this is there or what use it is but it is a pain. Mine is now checked.

I’m Leaving Mozy for Jungle Disk

Posted on April 14, 2010

I have finally come to my wits end with Mozy.

This time it was me logging into my account and seeing that my Mac Mini only had 80GB backed up as opposed to the 500GB it was supposed to. After some digging it seemed that it wasn’t backing up my external hard drive – again.

After doing a little research I figure out that it must have been when I change the hard drive cable from USB to Firewire. It was the same enclosure and same hard drive but just a different cable. Lame.

I tried to reconfigure Mozy so that it would now backup my hard drive but it got stuck. I fired up the Activity Monitor and killed it and tried to reopen it – fail. I restarted 3 times over the last 3 days and it refused to restart.

I uninstalled Mozy.

From there I fired up Jungle Disk and it saw my external drive – like always. It wasn’t afraid of a simple cable change. I told it to start backing up and it did, no questions asked.

So why didn’t I just use Jungle Disk from the begining? Well I did but it gets pricey especially since you have to pay for the actual storage space you use and for the transfer of the data as well. Amazon is cheap for the most part but 500GB is about 3 times the amount then what I was paying with Mozy.

I guess you get what you pay for.

The other big difference between the two is recovering your files. I am fortunate that I have never had to recover an entire hard drive from either service. I have read though that recovering files from Mozy is a pain. I have downloaded around 10GB from Jungle Disk and it was a breeze.

In the end I may pay a little more but Jungle Disk with Amazon is much more reliable then Mozy.

I Think Google Chrome Killed My WordPress Blog

Posted on March 25, 2010

I have been using Google Chrome on my MacBook for the last few months and have been happy with it – up until about a week ago. About a week ago it seemed that it started to run slower especially when I was in the admin section of a WordPress site (which is all the time). Specifically I would click on the publish or update button and it would seem that the site would get stuck. After a while I would click the refresh button to get it unstuck and lose my work I was trying to save.

Yesterday I was doing some work on my theabundantlife.net blog. I updated some posts and then did a new post. After the new post I did not do anything on the blog. I was having the same issues on that site as I had been having on the other WordPress sites.

This morning I went to the same blog to do another post and there was no content on my home page and no page links on it! I quickly logged in and found that I had zero posts and zero pages. I freaked!

My first thought was that I had been hacked but I had the latest version of WordPress.

I quickly went to my email and searched for a recent backup of the site (I back it up daily and send it to myself via email). Luckily their was a backup from yesterday. I restored the site to yesterday’s version which did not have the latest post that I had done.

I then did a search to see if this was a new venerability and soon found out that there wasn’t. What I did find out is that the disappearing posts and pages happens from time to time when a section of the database gets corrupted. The solution is to do a repair on the db to fix it. I had already done a restore so a repair was not needed in my case.

The reason why I think it was Google Chrome that killed my WordPress db are the times that it seemed to get stuck. Chrome must have been getting stuck in the middle of writing to the db and when I refreshed the browser it killed it somehow. It’s weird but that’s what I think happened.

Needless to say I am back using Firefox again and am actually happy with it. It seems much faster and more stable then Chrome was. Oh well, I’ll use Firefox until it gets slow again and then maybe I will go back to Safari ;-) .

Blogging on My Mac with Windows 7 and Live Writer

Posted on January 20, 2010

Windows-7-parallels So I have taken to doing more blogging lately after a very long hiatus. As apart of my step back into blogging I did another search for desktop blogging applications that would work on the Mac as well as Windows Live Writer works on Windows. Unfortunately IMO there is still nothing that comes close.

My love for Windows Live Writer has pushed me to what may claim to be an extreme work around, but never the less, it is what works for me and I am happy.

What I have done is installed Windows 7 in Parallels and run WLW in it. My Macbook runs great with 1GB of its 4GBs of RAM allocated to Windows. It only begins to slow down if I happen to be running Parallels, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop at the same time (DM and PS are running in OS X). I usually do not have those open when wanting to blog though so I really do not run into trouble.

Some may ask what would push me to run a completely different operating system just to do the occasional blog post?

There are several reasons for this.

Desert The first would be that WLW actually downloads the images and CSS from your blog and you are typing your post in the exact format that you blog is in. This is really helpful when you are doing formatting items such as H tags and images. It truly is WISIWIG and it makes for faster posting of more attractive posts.

Jellyfish Speaking of images WLW has the best image editor of any other desktop blogging tool I have seem. All you do is drag and drop the image into your post. From there you can resize the image by grabbing a corner and dragging. Once you are done dragging the corner the image is resampled as opposed to just being resized. I have not seen any other blogging tool do this.

Lighthouse Also available are a whole bunch of effects you can give the images such as drop shadows, photo frames, and reflections. Along with that you can set custom margins for the images so that your text does not run into them. Finally you can set the images to link to pages, the original size of you image, or to nothing at all. It really does make incorporating images into your posts easy.

There are several other features that WLW has but the above mentioned ones are those that I use the most. They make it worth it to run Windows on my Mac ;-) .

Still Trying to Troubleshoot FeedWordPress Issues

Posted on July 8, 2009

defeatUnfortunately the last few updates to the FeedWordPress plugin have not fixed the issues that I have been having. What is going on is that the meta data is not being pulled in to the individual posts when automatically searching for feeds and therefore it is not linking back to the original post.

I have setup a test site with a fresh install of WordPress and the FeedWordPress plugin that is updating correctly so it looks like I may have to kill my main site and start from scratch. The good thing is that I will be able to keep all 300+ posts that the main site has by exporting and reimporting via the WordPress import/export mechanism. My plan is to export the content, delete all the WordPress files including themes and plugins, and delete the db. From there I will do a reinstall of everything with fresh files and cross my fingers that it will work. It seems extreme but it seems the only fix available.

Wish me luck!

AT&T Comes Out with Their U-Verse iPhone App

Posted on June 25, 2009

I have loved AT&T U-verse from day one. I I have loved my 3 iPhones. Today the two have come together in a match made in heaven via the U-Verse TV iPhone app.

The U-verse TV iPhone app allows you to control your U-Verse DVR from your iPhone from anywhere. You can see your scheduled recordings, set new recordings, browse the TV listings, and search for shows and/or channels. Basically it has all the functionality that you have via your TV for your DVR on your iPhone. Pretty cool.

This will really come in handy when remembering that I want to see a particular show but am not near my TV to schedule it. In my opinion AT&T is doing a great job of bringing all of their services together. From having the integration between my DVR and iPhone along with free Wifi at any Starbucks it really is a great value.

Why I Really Like WordPress 2.8

Posted on June 22, 2009

I have been slowly updating the sites that run WordPress over the last week or so and have started to really love WordPress 2.8. The reason for this sudden burst of affection are a couple of new features that version 2.8 introduced.

wordpress-upload-themeThe first feature that I really like is the ability to upload themes and plugins via the WordPress interface. This has eliminated the need to break out Dreamweaver or another FTP program to get something uploaded to a site.  That is significant because I usually download plugins and/or themes to my desktop. If I have to upload either of them with FTP I have to put them in a particular folder and hopefully I already have the FTP info entered into my program. If not then I need to go through those steps. With the web based upload feature I can quickly upload in a few steps.

The other feature that I like is the built in code editing for themes and plugins. I know this feature has been around for a while but 2.8 added code highlighting. This makes it much easier to find and edit small items without having to break out an FTP program and code editor.

These two features have reduced the time that it takes me to do small edits and I am truly gratefully for them.

iPhone 3GS – I Got MY New Baby

Posted on June 20, 2009

iphone-3gs-video-cameraI was going to wait until my birthday in July but the wife gave the go ahead to get my new Iphone 3GS this morning – so I did. I was fortunate to get to the AT&T store near me when I did because the place had a constant stream of people and there were only around 10 iPhones left when I got mine. I had called all the nearby Best Buy’s but they were all out.

The main reason for getting the new iPhone 3GS was the video camera. A while back I had Jailbroken my iPhone 3G and installed the iPhone Video Recorder on it but at 15 frames per second it was not that usable. I really wanted something that I could keep in my pocket so I could capture cool things that the kids were doing. I had considered getting a Flip camera but that was just another thing I would have to lug around with me.

One thing that pushed me to buy today was that I took a look at some of the videos that people had uploaded from their 3GS phones this morning. The quality was better then I expected especially for outdoor videos. Indoor quality still leaves something to be desired but it does on every camera.

I ended up with the 32GB version since the 16GB ones were sold out. What I feel that I get for $100 is the ability to put my entire 10GB+ iPhone library on my phone which I think is pretty cool. That leaves room for a ton of apps and several movies.

I will be playing with the video camera over the next few days and post some videos.

iPhone Firmware 3.0 Installed and I’m Liking It

Posted on June 17, 2009

It took a few hours but I finally got through to the authentication servers to update my iPhone to the 3.0 firmware. The process took about 15 minutes total and went without a hitch.

iphone-voice-memosThe first thing that I noticed when starting up was the new Voice Memos icon on my home screen. I have been using Evernote for text and voice memos for a while now so I am not quite sure how useable this will be for me. The only advantage I can see that it has over Evernote is that Evernote limits you to a 5 minutes for your voice notes while the new native app seems to have no limit. You can pause your voice note and then email it when you are done where I suppose you could add text notes to it as well. We will have to see if it gets used.

iphone-apps-storeThe next thing that I checked out was the app store to see if there were any updates for any of my apps. I know that the WordPress iPhone app version 3.0 has been submitted to the app store but unfortunately did not show up. What did show up were updates to Evernote, Showtimes, and Enigmo. I selected to update them all and they seemed to get stuck on my menu page with all three apps saying “Installing”. After several minutes of waiting for this to clear itself I went back into the app store and then was presented with a message that I had to agree to the new Terms of Service for the app store. That took another couple minutes and then my apps were updating. Note – The Evernote update is awesome – lots of cool new stuff.

iphone-cameraFrom there I decided to check out how the camera was doing since I heard that there were updates there. Sure enough my camera started up much quicker and when I pressed the shutter button it actually took the picture right then as opposed to waiting a second or two! Also the pictures seems to be clearer but the true test will be when I try to snap some pics of the kids later on (Kids are true test of any camera!).

iphone-copy-pasteI then decided to see how Safari was doing with its updates. It seemed to be snapper which was nice. While browsing a page I remembered that copy and past was available and decided to try it out. It was actually much easier to use then I had anticipated. I easily selected a paragraph of text and then brought it over to my notepad and pasted it. After that I went back to Safari and coped a URL and successfully pasted inside on my WordPress app. It wasn’t even their new version and it worked! Awesome.

Finally I checked out the Spotlight search function but could not think of anything to search for. I am sure it will come in handy down the road.

All-in-all I would say that the iPhone 3.0 firmware is great, especially for being free. I am still planning on upgrading to the 3GS in the next month or so though. The main reason is for the video camera. I will be checking it out at the Apple store when it comes out to make sure that it is good quality and then hopefully scoop one up for my birthday.

Great job Apple! Just buy a new activation server though please…

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