Tips From Tony Blog

I’ve been seeing MacBooks and MacBook Pro’s with damaged hard drives lately, and this might explain it…  
I’ve been assuming for a while now that the situation is exacerbated by bad timing.  The computer needs to settle down COMPLETELY (the light needs to be pulsing) before picking it up and slinging it into the car on your way home.  The built-in accelerometers have a habit of waking the laptops up (if you don’t let them go completely to sleep first) and causing the read-heads to bang against the hard drive disk as you go bouncing across train tracks and around corners.  If you’ve ever taken your laptop out of the bag and found it to be hot-hot-hot, you should be very wary of the integrity of your data, since that symptom tells you that your Mac never went to sleep after all.
I have a laptop in my kitchen right now that is painfully, slowly allowing me to backup the client’s data before having the hard drive replaced.  It’ll take several days!
 I’m actually starting to think of INSISTING that everybody with a recent Mac upgrade to Leopard, and buy a really big external hard drive.  Any money spent toward simple and easy backups will pay off BIG when things go haywire.

After reading zillions of online articles, and finally installing Leopard (OS X 10.5) on two of our household’s computers, I’m satisfied that there are no major glitches to watch out for, as long as you install it properly.

Go for it! The new Time Machine automatic back and simplified restore alone makes Leopard worth the money, and Apple surely knows that, because their packaging and background imagery make it plain that Time Machine is Leopard’s biggest selling point.

Downsides? Some of my older programs (such as Thoth, which nobody uses except for me) tend to get overwhelmed by the new Spaces feature, and the newfangled Finder windows keep making me think that I’m looking at iTunes windows. I’m having to do a lot of re-learning my most common Finder keystrokes, because things have been moved around a lot.The changes have all been made in the name of making life simpler, so I’m not complaining. I’m adapting!

The hidden cost of upgrading to leopard is that you MUST BUY AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE! This is not optional. Why? Because the process of backing up and restoring has finally, finally been reduced to the simplest, most elegant steps imaginable, and external hard drives are cheap-cheap-cheap. Choose the biggest one that you can afford, and make sure that it has Firewire if you aren’t sure whether your Mac has the newer, faster USB ports.

I’ve pulled out a lot of my hair trying to help folks do data backups, because of the disastrous alternative. In fact, as I’m writing this, there is an iMac G5 on the floor next to my feet waiting forlornly for its owner to pick it up. He lost EVERYTHING when the hard drive failed. He had no backup whatsoever. He was begging me to help him recover his tens of thousands of crucial e-mail messages, and after three days of trying, I had to give up.

Now, with Time Machine, there are two steps involved in order to achieve perfect backups :

1. Connect the hard drive to the Mac and turn it on.

2. When Leopard asks you if you want to use the hard drive for backups, you say yes. That’s it.

Everything else is completely automatic. No programming, no annoying glitches, nada.

I just got back from a week of classes at the Apple Mothership in Silicon Valley, and we learned an immense amount of stuff that was super-secret hush hush. Now that Leopard is finally shipping, I can reveal the most important detail:

Time Machine is not just some extra program that got thrown together. It’s built into the deepest parts of the operating system. It works so perfectly because everything else has been built around it. Microsoft has had something sorta similar in concept for years, but it’s an add-on program, it’s hard to use, and it backs up onto the same drive as your data! The new backup option in Microsoft’s Vista operating system isn’t any simpler or friendlier.

Leopard is going to add an enormous amount of peace and tranquility to the world’s balance of mental anguish, due to the ease and value of Time Machine.

On Oct 22, 2007, at 6:02 AM, Bob wrote:

You have sent several emails talking about leopard but you have not weighed in yet. Should we all be upgrading now or should we wait to see how the roll-out goes?

You caught me!

I can easily drum up enthusiasm for the CONCEPT of something new and zoomy, but I always wait a bit before I say “It actually works, and won’t blow up in your face!” You won’t hear anything like that until I’ve actually had time to test it out myself, and read a BUNCH of hands-on reviews. I would hate to say something rash and cause a bunch of unhappy folks to lose important work or something.

It might be a good idea to wait a few days before taking the plunge.

I promise - I’ll be very regular and informative in my writings, keeping everyone up to date. This is the biggest, most technologically-advanced operating system upgrade I can ever remember, and it holds great promise, but it also holds the possibility of messing with the ways that we’ve done things for a long time.

For instance:

If you are using a program that runs in “Classic” mode (such as the Clients & Profits ad agency business management software), it absolutely will NOT work with Leopard on your computer (without spending an additional $1600 for the newer version), since Leopard does not support OS 9 at all. However, I found a really cool way for older programs like that to continue onward without any problems - Just run Clients and Profits on an older Mac across the room, running an older operating system, and use a program such as Chicken of the VNC to remotely operate that computer as if you were sitting in front of it. At current network speeds, it’s downright pleasant to use… Just one click of an icon, and you’re staring at another computer’s desktop and programs!

As you might have noticed, Apple finally announced the shipping date for Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5): It’ll be available starting at 6PM on October 26th. Expect to see lines forming at the Apple Store!

It’ll be $129, unless you’ve purchased a new Mac or Xserve on or after October 1, 2007, you can get Leopard for $9.95.

If you buy a Mac AFTER October 26th, it’s free and pre-installed!

Be sure to check out the new features… They’ve done a lot of work to make your computing experience easier and more enjoyable. I’ve been up here in Silicon Valley for days now, learning how to support my clients that will be using Leopard, and it’s a BIG update. Much to learn, and all of it good. Microsoft Windows is miles further back than it was before, and it’s disappearing over the horizon. Apple’s stock value is going to go much higher, because the Mac is going to eat up a lot of market-share that was unavailable before.

I’m very excited about the Leopard Server software. They’ve changed it so that most small businesses will be able to own a powerful server computer that will do automatic backups (that are ridiculously easy to restore), handle all calendar and addresses for the whole company, share printers and provide centralized storage. The price-point has dropped to a tenth of what it would have been for the same storage, power and features a couple of years ago, and it’s Macintosh-easy to manage. 2008 is the Year of the Leopard Server, folks.

I was a faithful Apple fan ten years ago, when there was much doubt about Apple’s future. Life is much less stressfu, now that Apple is building one success upon another!

I’m leaving this Saturday (October 13) to fly up to Silicon Valley to take my annual high-end tech classes with Apple at the Mothership. I’m anxious to learn all about Leopard (OS X 10.5), since it really is going to be a big deal… Many jumps ahead of anything else anywhere.

The trip is going to cost me thousands of dollars by the time it’s over with, so I promise to study hard and make you proud of me! For that kind of money, Dennis and I could have gone to Italy again, as I’m always dreaming that we should.

If anybody needs any Apple-logo garments, let me know, since I’ll have access to the REAL Apple Store on the Cupertino Campus. It’s normally open only to Apple employees. I dumped a whole pile o’ cash on some sensational stuff (that’s not available anywhere else) last year. Everything there is ultra-high quality, durable and classy, just as anyone would expect from an Apple Store.

After trying with all of my brainpower to help folks who want to use their Internet all over their house, I’ve become quite an anti-Airport bigot. In my own home, I’ve hand-wired every room in our 1918 Craftsman-style Bungalow with nice, solid Ethernet cabling. We have three laptops, but NONE of them use any wireless network. Even in our old, small house made out of Douglas Fir, the signal doesn’t travel well.

After so many years of hearing complaints, my attitude has hardened. I’ve been disparaging wireless for a long time (except when somebody is traveling, and there is no other alternative), and have seen Ethernet cables as the only other possible alternative.

Well, as of today, I’m open to a third alternative.

For decades, I’ve seen adapters that plug into your home’s electrical system and allow networking through your power outlets, but they never impressed me much. According to recent reviews, those bad old days are over. The technology has matured, and the features and pricing are VERY attractive.

I’m planing to order a pair of the newer, faster adapters ($139.99 for the pair) to test them out on behalf of my clients. I’m going to throw the hardest test at them that I know of - Streaming high-definition video from my computer downstairs, through the house electrical system, to an AppleTV box connected to the big-screen TV upstairs. If that works well, then I plan to recommend them all of the time. The concept saves the expense of hiring an electrician to install a network behind the walls. With these modern adapters, re-routing or adding new units is a simple task.

I’ll let everybody know what I find out. I suspect that we’ll have a speed advantage because our house has all-new wiring. Older aluminum wiring can slow things down.

I have many, many movies and TV shows that I stream from my computer to the big screen already - The AppleTV ($249 at Costco) is absolutely indispensable to our entertainment needs. We depend upon it as much as we do our (still very buggy, but beloved) Tivo HD. I’m living right spang in the middle of futuristic entertainment, and it works dandy!

In fact, it’s SO dandy, I will be hosting another High-Definition Popcorn Night at my place after I get back from Apple Training in Silicon Valley this month. I will be showing off what all entertainment will be like in a few years. It’s really impressive, and as simple as can be. If you want to be on the VERY LIMITED guest list, reply to this e-mail and let me know what nights work best for you after October 19th. I’ll try to accommodate as many folks as possible.