Daily Reading: Maintenance Myths for you Mac

Macworld, on five myths of Maintenance for your Mac. 

.mac is down; conspiracy theories abound

So .mac mail has been down for the better part of the morning, and the .mac home page is down, too. 

Technical difficulties, or is it down for a rebranding? Only your mother knows for sure, and if you call her to ask her, she's going to pretend she doesn't, so why bother. 

I'm thinking even if it is something, it's not going to show up in the service until next week's WWDC, because that's just they way Apple is. 

Daily Reading: Maintain your Mac

Macworld, on maintenance for your mac. 

Me.2

Speculation abounds as to whether Apple is going to change the name of .mac to "Mobile Me" or me.com or  something like that (as the company that hosts the Me.com domain is the same company that hosts apple.com. Coincidence? Could be.

Now rumours are starting that Apple is going after a bunch of new domains from Montenegro...extension? .me .

Again, this could all be coincidence (nobody made a fuss when Apple went and got apple.ca or apple.fr or apple.jp or apple.any other country suffix. Bt the timing is suspicious. Of couse, the .me domains are only now becoming available (will be available to register on June 6 and the top level domain goes live July 17. 

Super Duper Saved My Bacon

A couple or three weeks ago, I picked up a 250 GB internal drive to replace the pathetically mall 50 GB drive that came in the wife's older model Macbook. 

A couple days ago, I finally got all the stuff off my old Firewire drive and onto the Drobo, which meant that I could take and use the firewire drive as a clone. 

This was the step that I had been waiting for, and has been the cause, or rather the catalyst for a number of recent problems I've had. (The G4 NAS stopped working while I was trying to transfer stuff from the Firewire drive). 

I tried doing a clone with Super Duper to a sparse disk image, but I couldn't get the computer to recognize it, so I had to clean the drive off and clone to that.

And I'm so happy I went to the effort. Because it turned into a bit of an adventure. 

Changing hard drives on a Macbook is dead simple. Loose three screws. Pull out an L bracket. Pull out the old drive. Attach new drive to sled. Insert new drive. Put computer together. 

However, when I was putting in the new drive, something went wrong. Maybe I aimed wrong. Maybe I didn't tighten the screws enough. But the rubber guides that the drive slides in on came lose and bunched up at the end of the drive bay. Great. After trying to see if I could gently get the drive in with these lose, I gave up and pulled the computer apart and glued the rubber guides down (or rather, the wife did; I'm so proud of her. She has much finer motor control, so she was much better working with the 3 mm screws....)

That took all of four hours to finally get working and then, and then, after all that hassle, I couldn't find the install disks for my wife's machine. No problem. I'll use my install disks. They're both Macbooks, right? Wrong! Because hers is an iteration or two back, I got "could not install on this system". 

Yay!

What to do?

Boot from the Firewire drive (holding down F; option key wasn't working), and then clone the old system back onto the new drive. 

It wasn't pretty, and I really wanted to do a fresh install on the OS (as there are some issues with her machine), but she's got her computer back, and she's not going to kill me. 

So, thank you Super Duper! for being dead simple to use, and, in my experience, pretty well bulletproof. 

More iPhone

Things are still up in the air over at the Wireless Spectrum Auction. After ten rounds...well, I'm not sure exactly what's happening, actually. Companies are bidding on things, I've got that. But this is going to be a bit of a drawn out processs.

Meanwhile, ITBusiness says the iPhone will boost Canada's Wireless Service Market. To which I reply, "duh." I'm thinking about getting one, and I can't even use it from home, as I live in a GSM free zone. And I must say, I keep seeing "All you can eat" getting tossed around, which would be very nice....

,Mac is a-changin?

Cnet reports that other people are reporting that there are some changes deep in the code with 10.5.3 that suggests that Apple now has the ability to rename .mac to...

Well, that's just it. It isn't a change, it is a code string that gives them the ability to change the name. 

If they do change the name, I hope that's not the only thing that changes; I'm working on a post about .mac, with a few possible suggestions for fixes. Look for that sometime later next century.