Colin Charles Agenda

iTunes is fixed now (11.1.3) but somewhere in-between it broke and deleted all of my podcast downloads as well as the subscriptions. It has been over four months that I’ve gone without listening to podcasts and I can’t say that I miss it hugely. Audiobooks (on phone, in gym particularly), Spotify and Rdio have taken its place. 

This means a lot to me – I always thought that podcasting could be big business. Maybe its just niche business?

Apple engineering needs to QA this stuff. It’s not hard. There should be test harnesses. Heck, just testing the damn upgrade. 

In other news, the up arrow key seems dodgy again on my Macbook Air. It is still only 11 months old and this is the second time its happening. I will have to find time to walk into an Apple Store to get an immediate replacement (something we can’t do in Malaysia/Singapore obviously).

Overall feeling on the Apple experience in these terms: relatively negative. Am I going to give up their stuff? No. There’s a more positive post on Apple coming soon.

10.8.5 has been largely a disaster in terms of usability.

The FaceTime camera basically doesn’t work with apps that aren’t Apple-released on my MacBook Air. This means Google Hangouts, Skype video, all don’t work. Grr.

iTunes (11.1) podcast library scans like crazy, and the performance is terribly slow. I can’t delete iTunes podcasts, because everytime it tries to connect to the Internet and show me what else is there. Guess what? It seems that when I’m offline, iTunes just works. Annoying because I can’t listen to podcasts with ease now.

I updated my iPhone 4 to iOS7. It seems to just work, its slow as always, but I’m noticing apps crash, the camera can cause the phone to reboot. My father updated it automatically (without a backup) because he just said “yes”. It kind of bricked his phone when he couldn’t remember his iCloud password. Rather annoying. 

I think its great that updates can happen “over-the-air” since some iOS releases ago. But I should also be able to disable this, because I don’t want to remotely debug an issue. Try telling a businessman he can’t use his phone for half an hour?

What is kinda cool? FaceTime audio. This has huge potential.

In other news, I broke the up arrow key on my MacBook Air. This machine is about 6 months old. Replaced at the Apple Store, the Genius sorted it out within a minute. I’ve been using Mac laptops since about 2002 and this is the first time a key has broken. Designed in California, Made in China.

Today I killed Dropbox and Copy, then I killed Skype, turned the WiFi off, and my 13″ MacBook Air was getting about 6.5 hours worth of battery life. This is very close to the 7 hours that Apple claims will work (though they do say 7 hours of wireless usage). Chrome, Firefox had tabs running, I was working in Mail and Terminal a lot, as well as Keynote (with 15 apps running when i mac+tab)

So what’s missing is battery profiles.

When plugged in, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Copy, etc. run.

When on the battery, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Copy, Time Machine, etc. stop running.

When on the battery with no WiFi, maybe Evernote sync stops, Google Drive stops, etc.

This app should make sure its all configurable.

Why hasn’t this appeared yet?

Maybe OS X Mavericks will rock in this sense since the CPU usage is only for the current running app, not those background running apps.

I’m willing to bet this kind of app makes sense even on Linux and Windows. We’re using apps that increasingly sync to the network. Some are badly behaved.

Road warriors need better solutions. And I bet they’d pay for it.

Today I performed a brew update. I noticed that MariaDB now exists as stable (5.5.30) and devel (10.0.2). Brew formulas also exist for MySQL (5.6.10) and Percona Server (5.5.30-30.2) now. 10.0.3 is around the corner but I wanted to run 10.0.2 now. This is how I did it:

brew unlink mariadb
brew install --devel mariadb

It’s that simple!

I tried running Inkscape and it wouldn’t start. It seems that OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) doesn’t ship X11 any longer, and you have to use XQuartz.

You’re then forced to log out & log back in. Once that is complete, Inkscape and others work again. This problem doesn’t exist with The GIMP any longer as that is now native. Here’s hoping Inkscape moves with the times too.

On OS X Mountain Lion, df now has lots of extra inode information. This is the new default according to the man page (turning on -i). The workaround to get the old df output is simple – just use -P. So df is now aliased as: df -Ph

byte@lovegood~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  iused    ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51% 62130995 59797234   51%   /

byte@lovegood~$ df -Ph
Filesystem      Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465Gi  237Gi  228Gi    51%    /

Much friendlier.