BatFlattery

John Gruber’s recent hard disk failure, combined with some travel plans that I have, made me realise that I need to improve my backup strategy. I currently have a 500Gb Iomega FireWire external hard drive permanently connected to my iMac, so that Time Machine can do its backups. But as Gruber points out, you can’t just boot from your Time Machine drive in the case of catastrophic disk failure: you need a bootable backup disk. I was also worried that if something happened to my iMac while I was away, such as theft or destruction by fire, the Iomega might be lost as well.

So I decided to buy a new external drive and back it up with SuperDuper, which I have used before. The great thing about SuperDuper is that it comes in a free version that you can use to create complete, bootable backups of your main drive (the paid version lets you do incremental backups, whereas the free version erases the backup drive each time, so it takes much longer to do regular backups).

I looked on Amazon for a nice external drive. All of my external drives to date have been the large, powered ones, because they are generally cheaper, and also faster; but finding yet another socket on the power strip for one more wasn’t something I relished. Since I only intended to use it for periodic backups, relying on Time Machine for my day-to-day backups, and since prices seem to have declined, I decided on a Seagate 500Gb portable drive, the Seagate 500gb Expansion External Portable Usb 2.0 Hard Drive. It is a portable drive, entirely powered by the USB cable, and costs about £70.

It arrived from Amazon this morning, and I was somewhat alarmed to see all the Windows compatibility stickers all over it, with no mention of Macs. On opening the box I found a really small and light drive, not much bigger than an iPhone. Plugged into the iMac, it was attached in the Finder, and showed a few files, including an Autorun file, and a Seagate folder containing some junk.

First problem came when trying to delete these files; the Finder couldn’t do it. I fired up Disk Utility and saw that it was formatted as an NTFS drive, not a total surprise as that is the latest Windows file system! So I just reformatted the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and proceeded to do the backup on SuperDuper.

The tradeoff with the external power supply soon became apparent; the drive is not very fast, and backing up 136Gb took a couple of hours. The next annoying thing happened when I tried to set the drive as the boot volume, to test the backup by actually booting from it. The drive did not appear in the selection window.

A quick scan of the SuperDuper help site revealed a possible problem: OS X under Intel can boot from USB drives (unlike PowerPC Macs) but not if the disk is partitioned using Master Boot Record (MBR). A quick check with Disk Utility showed that the disk was indeed so partitioned (and why wouldn’t it be?). Aaargh!

So if you’re going to use this little drive as a SuperDuper bootable backup, remember to repartition the drive itself, and don’t just reformat the volume.

Finally, some wise words from Gruber:

Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

Make sure you are prepared for when yours goes phut. Not if. When.

Something weird happened to my Powerbook last week: the display has become badly garbled, and it’s not really possible to make out any of the text on the display. Other than that it works fine! Boots up, works as well as I can make out from the screen etc. Annoyingly, an external display shows the same problem, and even VNCing in shows the same distortion on the client display.

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You may have heard that Amazon are selling non-DRM MP3 downloads. I shit you not. Anyway, I decided to check it out. I’ve been thinking about buying Amy Winehouse’s album, but it was £12 at HMV (sod that) and it’s not in iTunes Plus on the iTMS, which means a lousy 128kbps file. But lo, at Amazon it’s a 256kbps, non-DRM MP3! And the whole album is like $9! Or £4.50 for those of you not up to speed with the dollar’s decline.

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OK, I’ve finally given up on Firefox. I know I’m supposed to like it, I know it’s the hope of the free world, the Rebel Alliance fighting the good fight against the Microsoft Empire, etc etc, but I’m just tired of it killing my PowerBook all the time. I’m tired of my Mac feeling like a 486 PC with 8 megs of RAM, struggling to run Windows. I’m tired of the exhaust fan coming on every time I move the mouse, because Firefox has eaten up all the free memory AGAIN, and OS X has to shunt more pixels into and out of virtual memory to redraw the screen. I’m tired of waiting for Gmail to catch up with what I’ve written. I’ve had enough.

It’s not like Safari is that bad, anymore. It has tabbed browsing. It doesn’t screw up so many sites anymore. And if you have to have a Mozilla-based browser, Camino is pretty darn good. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, and I like it a lot. It uses the Keychain to store web passwords, which is really nice: it makes me feel much more secure about my important passwords, and I can find them easily if I want them for another browser. Plus, it has an “update stored password” function if you’re trying to log onto a site you haven’t accessed for awhile, and your first password guess turns out to be wrong: it simply notices that you’ve typed a different password the second time, and offers to update. Nice.

And it looks pretty nice too.

Of course I’ll keep Firefox on the machine, to check the appearance of my web pages, etc, but at the moment I mostly use Camino and Safari for actual web browsing. No more painfully-slow Mac. No more periodically shutting down Firefox just to get it to let go of all the memory it hogged. No more worrying about opening Photoshop with Firefox running. Oh joy!

This is probably just a coincidence, but shortly after Bill Gates’ frankly laughable accusations against OS X security (broken on a daily basis?? Yeah, right. Whatever.) the new Mac ads poke fun at Vista’s heavy-handed security model. I haven’t used Vista, but the satire rings true for anyone who has tried to open an Office document containing a macro: Microsoft’s idea of “security” is to shield themselves from responsibility by asking you if you want to allow the potentially risky action, without giving you any information that would allow you to make a meaningful choice. So you can choose yes, and get what you have to get done, done: if a virus is unleashed as a result, Microsoft can shrug and say “we warned you”. If you choose no, you’re safe, but you can’t actually do anything – but Microsoft can say it’s made you “secure”.

technology
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

I love this picture: I think it shows how kids effortlessly take command of technology, without any doubts or fears, and how much fun it can be. (Of course, it helps that they’re using a PowerBook!)

So I just found out yesterday that the universal window-focus-rotation method on a Mac is the Command-~ combination. That’s to rotate the focus on the windows within a single app, whereas of course Command-Tab rotates through your apps. (Yes, I have had a Mac for nearly two years now. What’s your point??) So I’m happily rotating through my windows in Firefox, and Photoshop, and then today, I have Excel open, so I’m happily rotating through the… WTF! It doesn’t work!

Turns out that window-rotating in Excel for Mac works exactly the way it does in the Windows world: Ctrl-Tab. Now what you need to understand about Microsoft Office for the Mac is that it’s not a straight port of Office for Windows. Hell no. It’s a completely fookin different application (although it can share docs with the Windows one). But virtually everything is different, including all of the fargin keyboard shortcuts in Excel. Now when you’ve been using Excel in Windows since the friggin thing was invented, you get certain keyboard shortcuts more or less burned into your brain. Alt-= for the sum command, for example. F2 to edit the cell. And just hitting return to paste. Does that work in Excel for Mac? Fark no. Why would it? The famously hard-core Mac team at Microsoft have completely rewritten Excel for the Mac, dude! None of that Windows crap here!

Except for… the one thing where it makes SENSE to change, to fit in with the system-wide Mac way of doing things… oh, maybe we’ll leave that in.

FUCKWITS!!!

John Gruber on the “canaries in the (Mac) coalmine”.

I certainly agree with his analysis, and on a personal level, having come back to Mac via Linux, there is no freakin’ way I would go back now, not even if Ubuntu is the best Linux install ever. It’s not just about the OS (although I still don’t see how any PC OS can ever achieve the level of hardware integration that OS X has); it’s also about the software. Only those who have never used Photoshop seriously can say that the Gimp is equivalent with a straight face. And what about BBEdit? Plus all those really cool Apple apps, like Garageband, iMovie and iDVD. I’ll take Mark Pilgrim’s word that iMovie doesn’t let you export your edit points; but so what? It’s virtually a free app! What do you expect? If you want to be able to re-create your edit from the raw footage on another machine, you’re likely to be way above the target audience here. Apple sells real applications (for serious money) that do this; they’ve been used to edit feature films, so they must be in the ballpark. So pay for them, or put up with the limitations of the free apps that come with your Mac. Don’t whine about “closed formats”. It’s nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I read of what Mark Pilgrim and Corey Doctorow have written, the more convinced I am that these people are the most atypical Mac users (probably the most atypical anything, to be honest) I know of. They’re not canaries. They’re the weird birds who were hanging around the canaries when the miners caught them, and they flew away because they got bored. Or neurotic. The mine is safe.

Although I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with iTunes, I did notice something which tipped the balance in its favour, recently: none of John Lennon’s crap will be available on iTunes for the foreseeable. That’s right: no pathetic whining about peace, no ludicrous longing for the world to be as one. I’m feeling a lot better about iTunes already…

I just noticed something on the iTunes music store. Santana have (has?) released a new album, All That I Am, and the iTunes version of the album is said to have two bonus tracks, Foo Foo and Yaleo. Well, I’m willing to bet that they won’t be on the CD, but that’s because Foo Foo was on Santana’s previous outing, Shaman, while Yaleo was on the one before that, Supernatural.

So maybe I’m being incredibly naive here, but how is this a bonus? Are all “bonus” tracks on iTunes like this?