MacOS Lion 10.7.5 Bugs Recovering from Time Machine
I just lost my main hard drive in my Mac Pro. No big deal. I have Time Machine backups. The problem is some of the fixing and updating that needs to happen once I've restored. This is on Lion (10.7.5), not Mountain Lion (10.8).
Notifying me AFTER deleting all my backups
The first thing that happened was that MacOS did not offer me the oppportunity to inherit backups the way it should. So it asked me if I wanted to use the backup disk, and I said yes. Next thing I know, all my old backup versions are gone and it's complaining that it needs more space. I notice that in preferences you can ask it to notify you AFTER it deletes old backups. What about notifying me before?
New Backups take FOREVER
So now that I've given up on reusing my old backups, I actually decided to reformat the drive. Now I have an encrypted (FileVault2) backup drive, which has its advantages. But after 24 hours of constant "work", it seems only 1Gb out of 780Gb was backed up. Something's wrong. I found this article at CNET that explains how lots of people are running into this. So I turn off Spotlight.
App Store Apps need updating
So while Time Machine is doing its thing (still going to take 12-14 hours to backup my 1TB disk), I decide I'll update a few apps. Aperture and Snapseed both have updates available. It doesn't work. I get this strange "You have updates available for other accounts" error. Turns out that's also solved over at the Apple forums. The solution? Spotlight needs to be enabled and running.
So I'm Stuck
I can't turn on Spotlight because it will kill my backups, and I can't update my apps because I can't turn on Spotlight. Sigh.
Things I want from iOS
Every so often I moan about things that Apple still doesn't do on the iPhone that folks like Nokia have done for years. My current list (other than wanting better maps) is here.
Managing my Old Home Movies
I'm finally getting a handle on my old home movies. Between 3 different tools I'm making them much more useful than they used to be. The tools I'm using are:
Doctor Who Ring Tones for iPhone
Right up front let me tell you that I don't have a link where you can click and download the ring tones. What I did was find some cool Doctor Who sounds embedded in a free game, and then I used some free tools to make ring tones and text tones for the iPhone. You don't need to unlock or jailbreak your phone. It's all easy and straightforward. You need:
- Doctor Who games (see below)
- Audacity (free audio editing software)
- an iPhone, iPad, or other iDevice running iOS 5.0 or later
- iTunes (the one that you sync your iDevice to)
So Many Stupid Mac Photo Apps
I've just spent about 10 minutes going through the Apple App store looking at photography apps. I wanted to buy snapseed for MacOS, but it gets mixed reviews. Just like Windows users have thousands of text editors to choose from, Mac users seem to have thousands of photo editors to choose from. And just like the Windows world, all but a handful totally suck. Why—for the love of all things photographic—do we need yet one more stupid app that does edge detection? Have you ever seen a famous photographer or artist publish something remarkable that he did with that cheesey effect!? Why does every photo app show it on their preview page?
Give me a real effect, not just the stupid things you can find in your graphics 101 book.