Monthly Archive for November, 2006

What Was Fixed, and What Wasn’t

Published
by
Josh Kim
on November 29, 2006
in Apple
. 0 Comments

Photobooth was fixed after the reinstall. The system became more snappy overall. However, I quickly realized that things were becoming slower and slower… the beachball of death started to pop up, and applications (one by one) were becoming unresponsive, until all were frozen. I was hopelessly left with a moving cursor.

Great… a $1400 (estimated ebay price, off the top of my head) computer, giving me the ability to have a moving cursor on a 15″ widescreen display. Freaking… awesome.

Then after 10.4.8 (yes… that patch that rendered my computer worthless last time I tried…), I restarted. Then, to my horror, the computer wouldn’t continue past the twinkling circle. (I don’t know what the formal terminology is… sorry, someone enlighten me.)

At least I fixed my iPhoto before the system went to crap.

I guess I could reinstall, and just struggle on… but I can’t take this anymore. I hope that Apple will really show me how awesome their support is by being really fast and nice to my computer.

Please? Pretty please?

Lessons from Failures (Partially Mine)

Published
by
Josh Kim
on November 29, 2006
in Asides
. 0 Comments

Apple is now terminally ill. I HAVE to take it in to a place now… it won’t go past the waiting circle…

To my horror… I realized very recently (like 30 seconds ago) that all the local private posts I made using Wordpress (local installation I had)… were gone forever. There is no way of getting them back… and those were some lengthy and worthwhile posts. I think the last backup I did of all my blog posts was when I took down JoshKim.org… and that’s a couple weeks back… and knowing me, I write like 3 entries a day…

I think the reason why I completely neglected such an important backup was because I have two SAME systems for the public and private blog. It’s good that the public blog is online, so that even if my local machine blew up, I would have those posts, safe and secure.

Oh man… those are pages and pages… hours and hours of content I could look back onto one of these days… Blessings, struggles, to-do lists… oh geez, that SUCKS.

I really feel like not doing a single thing more today. I feel like… ____. Nothing is going my way, and especially this laptop issue.

I have a feeling though, it’s all a very powerful lesson. Since the computer will be the main source of income, I have to figure out a system to cope with such a down time. I guess having a second system would make some sense, but that’s not very cost effictive… maybe a Mac mini will do? I need SOMETHING to tie me over for a week, a most.

Another lesson: I still think way too much about (everything, obviously… but more accurately) keeping track of everything that happens in life. Why is it so hard to let go of timestamps of my cameraphone not being the datetime the picture was taken but when it was copied over bluetooth since the photo metadata gets overwritten and the only possible fix this problem is to buy a microSD card? Why is it so hard to go a day without reporting every second of every day? Why can’t I just live it?

Uh oh… it’s turning out to be one of those entries again.

I think I’m going to spend rest of the night on languages, foreign and programming.

One Good Thing About a Failing MacBook

Published
by
Josh Kim
on November 29, 2006
in Project Ideas
. 1 Comment

… is that I get to think again about how a desktop or a laptop computer’s role in today’s Internet society is changing.

This must be the 4th time I would be reformatting on the MacBook Pro(if I do reformat…). Every time I do reformat, I make sure I backup everything and anything. I even do an incremental DVD burn sometimes. I recently burned 2 DVDs worth of pictures and movies from my iPhoto, just so that I’ll have a physical backup, just in case my external hard drive blew up.

Just as I do with everything in life, I try to be as efficient as possible, by taking time to see if there are better solutions to problems that I face often. Backing up data is one of those things that deal with all the time… as should all people who use computers. While the Internet is fast enough to just purely store my photos, songs, movies on a remote server, I can’t have access to it with the speed of double clicking on something on my local machine: It’s still fast enough for me to use an external hard drive to back up my media (including my documents) and keep burning DVDs regularly (Hard Drive is still faster than my Internet connection… maybe not so in Korea… but still, even if the Internet was faster than my Hard Drive, then the Hard Drive becomes the limit.) Back in the day, I would make backups of the ENTIRE file structure I had, without knowing that there are programs out there that would make things a little bit more efficient. By making backups of ONLY what changed, I could save lots of time and space… For this solution, I could go ahead and buy some incremental backup software such as SuperDuper or wait until Leopard’s Time Machine comes out. But this doesn’t actually solve my problem.

I want to identify what I need access to, and have all these areas covered by web applications. Call me crazy, but it would be awesome to be able to move seamlessly from computer to computer, while ONLY needing to access my media by an external hard drive. (This is until Internet gets fast enough to be able to stream media from a home server… we’re not there… yet.)

  • Email
    • Gmail is a great place to keep your email “backed up”, as long as Google stays un-”evil.” Currently, Gmail keeps copies of all emails that come in, while Mail.app gets a local copy.
    • I just hope there’s a way to send myself the old emails I have archived.
    • Also, if there was a way to make Gmail label emails properly depending on which folder I dropped the email into in Mail.app… that would be great.
  • Contact Information
    • Cellphone numbers: No complete solution yet. Facebook is a close solution, but it’s not as complete, since users can choose not to put up their information and not everyone that I know has a profile on Facebook. I think an application that does this is a possibility…
    • Screen names: AIM/Meebo. But I still like using Adium… because I can log conversations and have more features…
    • Email addresses: Mail.app keeps track of them… and there is Address Book.app for the Mac, also I could use Gmail to keep track of this.
    • HOWEVER: There is no complete online solution to contain all such information… and I would also want whatever this system it is to play with my favorite application, Quicksilver.
  • Bookmarks
    • Del.icio.us. I heard Ma.gnolia was better… I might have to try it sometime. But this is a great solution… and it plays well with Quicksilver, Firefox (plug-in), and Safari.
  • Feeds
    • I dislike most online feed readers. I love Vienna, because it’s free and open source and fast and responsive and does EXACTLY what I need.
    • I can go through feeds in very quickly, by being able to delete articles that are completely worthless (about 90% of which are Digg crap stories that link to the blogs I’m already subscribed to…)
    • I still want to be able to set it up so that OPML file is still saved somewhere…
  • iCal
    • There are plenty of Calendar tools out there, but iCal is just too easy and great to not use.
    • Easy to backup, since the feature is built in… but once again… have it automatically backed up somewhere.
  • Random notes
    • Sidenote: I love this program. I think it’s because it’s triggered by a keystroke, and it’s extremely useful. I shun the mouse for almost all tasks, since it’s less precise than a keyboard is. First reformat I did, I forgot to back this up from the /User/jk/Library folder, and lost a lot of tidbits of information I had. If there was a program that somehow posted all the information I made onto a server… hmm…
  • Docs
    • All of the files I’ve downloaded, including applications and full notes I make on presentations and articles I read online.

I see desktop applications becoming more and more useless unless there is an online component to them. The ideas of collaboration and connectivity are just too awesome to not utilize.

I guess until there are solutions for each and every one of these suckers… I’ll be just backing up my library folder…

My MacBook Pro is Dying…

Published
by
Josh Kim
on November 29, 2006
in Apple
. 0 Comments

I don’t know what’s up. Here’s a list of things that are wrong with my computer at the time of writing:

  • Photo Booth
    • I know that the camera works, since I tried using it with comic life, and I am able to take pictures. It’s just that there’s something wrong with either Photo Booth itself… or something else in the hardware.
  • iTunes
    • 1) I think might have caused this one, but at one point, my library died, killing about half of my mp3’s. Luckily, I had an older backup to revert to… but man, was it a painful experience
    • 2) Some mp3s are missing in the library, while they’re still in the iTunes Library folder. I have no clue what could be causing this.
  • iPhoto
    • What the FREAK is going on. Thumbnails are not corresponding to the right photos… even though the correct photos exist in the iPhoto folder. I’m completely unsure of what’s going on with this one. I rebuilt the library and everything, even ran repair permissions.
  • EFI Firmware Update
    • Still not working… I tried resetting the PRAM (P + R + command + option), as well as resetting the computer by pressing the power button after the battery was removed… removed all USB/Firewire attachments… blah blah blah. This isn’t as important, because I don’t have the “wake from sleep” issues.
  • “Scratchy” Screen
    • I thought it had to do with my external LCD, because the first time it happened, it was on my external one. And then I saw it happening on my MacBook’s LCD.
    • It’s one line of pixels… or a couple lines, and not a complete horizontal line, that is just noise from what was there previously. I thought it was a Firefox issue, but man, it’s happening in Finder and every where. It’s on an application basis, because the noise only occurs within a window of an application, and not across the entire screen.
  • Overall Unstableness
    • Things are slower… and if enough applications are up and running, I beachball and crash OR I have a moving mouse cursor, but unable to force quit or access any of the windows.
    • Possible cause: Memory overflow somewhere. I’ve noticed that my computer is in dire need of more memory… even though I maxed it out at the 2GB.

Therefore, I’m going to go home and backup EVERYTHING again… this is NOT going to be a fun week. I need to start researching for work, as well as keep on going with diving into my side project. Plus, I need to get this site up and running… but without a computer, it’s going to be a pain in the neck.

Is it time for just a completely new computer? Should I just go and get a 17″ MBP?

Almost Caught Up… But Why Is My Computer Being Dumb?

Published
by
Josh Kim
on November 28, 2006
in Site News
. 0 Comments

Two articles are pretty much written up (Wii and Thanksgiving), but I wanted to have a slick interface to have pictures included from an online photo database. I wanted to find an iPhoto plug-in, or at least a Wordpress plug-in to make things a lot faster and slicker.

However, as I was looking for the solution, my computer decides to be really really dumb.

As of tonight, I’m still very behind in creating a layout for JoshKim.org… and I don’t think I’ll be able to work on it… at least until this computer issue is fixed.