Let the blog see the rabbit...

For over a year, I've been planning to move my mail filtering rules from my mail client to my mail server. This will mean that mail is pre-filtered into the right folders regardless of how I view the messages - on my phone, on the web or on the desktop.

I had originally intended to use procmail, but TheRaven suggested I take a look at sieve. This uses a far easier-to-understand syntax so I've decided to go with it.

I use Exim, which already has sieve support built in. To enable it, just uncomment the allow_filter line in the userforward router. You can then write sieve rules in your .forward file as long as it starts with the line # Sieve filter

The next problem to solve is that by default sieve doesn't know where the inbox is - you get the error:

appendfile: file or directory name "inbox" is not absolute

The solution when storing mail in Maildir folders is to add the following to the address_file transport:

  maildir_format
  directory = ${if eq{$address_file}{inbox} \
              {$home/Maildir} \ 
              {${if eq{${substr_0_1:$address_file}}{/} \
                    {$address_file} \
                    {$home/Maildir/$address_file} \
              }} \
         }

Now I just have the task of rewriting all the rules I set up in my mail client into sieve rules in my .forward file.

Against the advice of Milliways denizens and my better judgement, I upgraded to Lion on launch day. After having to wait an age for a pre-upgrade Time Machine backup to finish, the upgrade itself went smoothly and I used my computer intensively for work on Thursday and Friday with no problems.

Today, I've had a chance to poke around in the settings a bit and have started noticing some nice improvements (such as invisible scrollbars) and changes that irritate me a bit (like the grey icons in Mail and Finder) and then there's the Launchpad.

Initially, I thought it might be a useful way of reducing the number of icons in my dock, but I soon discovered that it's ill-conceived, badly implemented and by all accounts just plain buggy. However, I have the menu bar (and therefore Launchpad) on a secondary monitor and don't suffer this particular bug.

Essentially, it is trying to be the iOS home screen, but there's no obvious need for it as you're not using a touchscreen and you can just go to the Applications folder. Were you able to only add a selection of commonly-used applications, it might be useful, but it seems that unless you installed an app via the Mac App store, you can't remove it from within Launchpad.

I've found a trick to solve this though - go into the sqlite database that stores Launchpad's data and nuke the apps table - and I may still use Launchpad as a page of favourite apps.

What gets me though is the lazy way that Launchpad has been implemented. There's no editor (that I've seen) like there is in iTunes for editing your iOS home screens so you have to tediously drag icons between a lot of pages of large icons (it seems every last app on your machine is added to Launchpad on installation and not in any sort of logical order). There's not even a search screen off to the left to find the app you want. Of course, you could just use Spotlight to do that - another reason that the Launchpad is rather pointless.

The only ways I can see Launchpad being useful is if Apple is planning on a netbook (which seems unlikely) or some sort of iPad Pro that runs OS X.

Edit (25/07/11): Having now tried doing this - using the trick above to empty Launchpad out first - I have discovered that at some point, OS X refills Launchpad with all your applications. It was possibly when I went into Recovery mode to try out Safari from there.

I got a slightly panicky phone call from my sister this morning because her laptop had suddenly decided to start asking for the Windows Vista install DVD.

It seems that a Windows Update went wrong and the computer suddenly decided that it was no longer activated. Rather than simply prompt to be activated, it wanted to be reinstalled from the install media. The dialog box appeared immediately after logging on. Once dismissed, you would be immediately logged off again, which means that an ordinary user now has no access at all to their files.

The computer, an Advent 5301, was supplied by PC World with no install media. There is the option to create a recovery DVD (actually, for some reason, it's two DVDs - despite the fact that one contains 4.1GB and the other contains just over 200MB, so it would all fit on one DVD) but I suspect this would just wipe and reinstall the system from scratch, and so would not be the install media that Windows was demanding.

With this in mind, I came round to my sister's with an Ubuntu Live CD, my laptop (OS X) and a USB caddy for 2.5" hard disks - the highest priority was to save all the user data. This was a beautifully simple task - I simply rsynced the entirity of c:\Users to my laptop. Having done this, I tried to perform a System Restore via the "Tech Guys" rescue partition that can be accessed by pressing F8 at boot time and selecting "Repair Your Computer". None of the system restore points worked and there was no option to do a non-destructive reinstall of the Windows files.

Had the computer been supplied with install media, this would simply have been a case of putting the DVD in when prompted and letting it get on with it. There's no excuse for PC World not supplying install media - including an OS install DVD (along with the other install media that was supplied) would have cost a matter of pennies.

Instead, I had to do a destructive reinstall, create the user accounts, then go back into Ubuntu and copy the Users directory back over the top (in fact I moved the "empty" Users folder to "Users-old" and created a new one which I then rsynced the contents back into). This, I discovered, prevented users from logging on. For some reason known only to Windows, it decided to display both directories as being called "Users" - sheer insanity. I suspect that the "genuine" Users directory was really called Users.{####-####-####-####} (the hashes being replaced by some cryptic string of characters) in the way I've seen Windows do in the past. If so, why didn't Ubuntu show this? If not, what was special about it? Back I went into Ubuntu, swapped the directories back again, went back into Windows then manually copied the contents of Documents, Pictures and Music into the user profiles, each time being told I had to have Administrative permission to do so. Getting such permission was simply a case of clicking "OK" twice - a meaningless gesture that provided no extra security. If it's going to force me to jump through these hoops for security reasons, it could at least have the decency to ask me for my password in the way that OS X does for such events.

Having got the user files restored, I then had to reinstall all the software that was on the computer previously.

A combination of Microsoft's, PC World's and The Tech Guys' decisions have made me waste a whole afternoon on a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place. It wouldn't have been hard for The Tech Guys to provide an option to run the Windows System File Checker to replace any damaged files. It would have cost virtually nothing for PC World to provide install media with every laptop they sell. Microsoft don't need to implement such strict piracy controls that they cause problems for entirely legitimate users who have done nothing wrong. If they are going to insist on reinstallation under certain circumstances, this could be done over the Internet using the Windows Update system.

Before I even took delivery of my iPhone, I had bought a Sena Eléga leather case and an Xtand. This limited my choices for protecting the device from scratches when it is out of the case as neither accessory allows for much increase in the dimensions of the iPhone.

However, having clumsily put my iPod nano in the same pocket as my keys once and scratched the screen, I was keen to avoid a repeat of this with my iPhone. Admittedly, this is less likely given that I have a leather case for my phone and so would be unlikely to put it in my pocket. Nevertheless, there's always the risk of dropping the device.

Having seen Chris Pirillo's video about protecting your iPhone, and having looked around online, I decided to get myself an invisibleSHIELD. The manufacturers, Zagg, claim, as the name suggests, that the product is virtually invisible when applied to the device, it causes no extra bulk and that it comes with a lifetime guarantee with free replacement should the invisibleSHIELD get damaged. I regard all of these claims to be false - more on that later.

Applying the invisibleSHIELD

I placed my order with Fire Lounge on Amazon and was impressed that despite choosing standard delivery, the product arrived the following day. Following the instructions printed on the inside of the box, I applied the product to my iPhone.

My first problem was that despite carefully cleaning both the device and my hands, some dirt got stuck to the underside of the invisibleSHIELD being applied to the screen and I could do nothing to remove it. However, it did prove quite easy to apply evenly and the supplied Shield Spray made it easy to adjust and avoid fingerprints.

I was quite disappointed with the accuracy (or lack of it) with which the invisibleSHIELD had been cut. While it didn't foul any of the buttons or the camera, overall, the back piece was significantly smaller than I felt it should have been - I had lined the right-hand edge flush (looking from the front) with the corner of the metal band on the right-hand side and the other side was well over a millimetre short.

Once applied, the instructions recommend leaving the device switched off for 24 hours to ensure that any excess installation solution evaporates and that the shield has "set up" properly. I can't imagine that many users will heed this advice as they will want to get on with using their device! Indeed, Chris Pirillo didn't even bother switching his device off to install his screen protector. That wasn't an invisibleSHIELD though and didn't involve a solution being applied. My impatience got the better of me after a couple of hours so I turned it on.

Initially, I was fairly pleased with the results (although very annoyed about the dirt, which seems to be a fairly common problem with screen protectors) and felt less concerned about my phone being damaged. The curved corners of the back of the device presented a problem for Zagg in terms of how to make a flat piece of sticky-backed plastic fit a three-dimensional curve. Their solution was not that satisfactory to my mind as it left a fair amount of the corners unprotected and of course, the corners of any device are likely to take the most punishment.

The problems start

After the invisibleSHIELD had had a chance to dry properly, I started using my xtand and Sena case again. The first problem was that the extra fraction of a millimetre thickness that had been added to the front and back made the phone much harder to remove from the leather case. This was something that Sena had warned about and advised that over time, the leather would adjust to the size of the phone.

After about a week of use, the flaps that so inadequately protected the corners of the device started peeling back as a result of inserting and removing the iPhone from the xtand. I used the Shield Spray once again and carefully restuck them, but after another couple of weeks, it was quite clear that this wasn't going to work so I cut them off.

Gradually, I became more dissatisfied with the invisibleSHIELD. That dirt speck irritated me more, particularly as the lifetime free replacements don't cover dirt, which was also now beginning to collect at the edges and corners.

Likewise, the slightly tacky texture (which is advertised as a feature - "Improves grip") was getting on my nerves as there was more friction on the touchscreen and the Home button was now slightly soggy to press - the nice positive click it makes when naked is absorbed by the plastic covering the button.

As the invisibleSHIELD is made of a flexible sticky-backed plastic, it doesn't have the sheer glossy finish of the iPhone screen, which detracts from the visual appeal of the device. This is probably a personal taste thing, as it certainly does mask fingerprints better for longer than even the oleophobic coating of the device's screen.

I decided to investigate the option of the promised free replacement as I would be prepared to give it another try without the annoying dirt. It turns out that you have to give Zagg your credit card details in order to receive a replacement. Not only do you pay the postage for delivery, you initially pay the full price of a new invisibleSHIELD, which is then only refunded if you send back your existing shield at your own expense within 25 days. Zagg recommend you use recorded delivery to avoid the loss of the shield in the post. As I am in the UK and they are in the US, it would cost me more in postage than to simply buy a new invisibleSHIELD on Amazon.

I finally give up

I spoke to a number of other iPhone users, none of whom bother with screen protection. Indeed frosty, who has had an iPhone for over a year, doesn't even bother with a case for his phone. His phone has fallen down a staircase and come out of it unscratched and he reports that it is still in good condition. He also quoted another SUCS member whose task it was, when working at Nokia, to find out what it took to scratch an iPhone. Apparently, the only thing he managed to make a mark with was another iPhone's screen.

On that basis, I have decided to remove the invisibleSHIELD from my phone and will not be seeking a replacement. It seems screen protectors are just not necessary unless you intend to take a dremel to the thing.

I’ve now had an iPhone 3G S for a little over a day and thought I’d share my first impressions.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the battery was pretty much fully charged out of the box and also how easy the keyboard is to type on even in portrait mode. Of course, practically, you are limited to single finger typing as you’re generally going to be holding the phone in your other hand. More on this later.

Once I went through the registration process and set up my 60 day MobileMe trial, I headed over to the App Store and started downloading. There were a few things I already knew I wanted - to complement applications already installed on my Mac Boo Pro - notably 1Password and Things. I also got the iTunes and Keynote remotes, iSSH and a free VNC client. As a Tetris addict, I also shelled out for the official version of that at £2.99.

At that point, having spent £16.05 on software, I decided to stop spending money and started looking for free apps that I would find useful.

I now have 63 icons on my home screens - so I’ve added 46 items, four of which are websites. There are a few that duplicate functionality - for example, I’m going to try out a few GPS tracking apps to find out which I prefer. There are still a few holes in my tool set though.

Medication tracking

I currently use On Time Rx on my Palm Zire 72 to keep track of all my medication and there’s a lot of it to keep track of. It’s a well-thought-out programme, which does nearly everything I need from it. Obviously, I won’t want to carry both my Palm and my iPhone around with me all the time, so I need to find a suitable replacement app on the iPhone.

One of the main reasons I didn’t want to get the previous incarnations of the iPhone was because of their inability to schedule notifications when the app concerned wasn’t running.

With Push Notifications, that problem has been solved, but it’s too early to expect a niche app to take advantage of them. Even so, there are already a few medication tracking apps out there, albeit without Push Notifications. I’m currently using a free app called iPills, which seems to be the best of a bad bunch. It tries to be clever with a graphical pillbox, with trays to show which tablets you’ve taken and which you’re yet to take. Unfortunately, it falls short in a number of respects. I take tablets at five different times during the day - 9am, 11am, 3pm, 8pm and 11pm. However, iPills only provides four trays - “Any Time”, Morning, Afternoon and Evening so it’s less than ideal. With seven different tablet types in the Morning and Evening trays, it’s quite fiddly to select the right tablet to mark as having been taken. iPills provides no system to provide alarms to remind you to take medication. They suggest you create iCal events to do that instead.

As well as reminding me when to take my tablets, On Time Rx also provides detailed logging and stock control. iPills does logging of a sort, but doesn’t record the time at which you took the tablets, which makes it worthless. There is no stock control system, so you have no idea how many days’ worth of tablets you have left. I get my tablets prescribed at approximately three-monthly intervals so frequently have several hundred tablets of a given type in stock.

I may well end up writing my own iPhone app to do medication tracking properly.

iPhone shortcomings

While iPhone OS 3.0 clearly brings a great number of improvements and some new features and the 3G S is certainly very nice hardware, there are still a number of areas where Apple could do better.

The biggest of the shortcomings from my point of view is the lack of support for Bluetooth keyboards. Both my Palm Zire 72 and Nokia 770 support Bluetooth keyboards (although admittedly the Palm has been rather temperamental at times) and this makes them vastly more useful. On a number of occasions, I have used my 770 to take notes at meetings. Fundamentally, however clever you get with onscreen or pull-out keyboards on mobile devices - and the keyboard on the iPhone is nice - they’re always going to be too small to type on properly. My folding Bluetooth keyboard (a Dell badged Think Outside Keyboard) provides almost full-sized keys and is easy to type on. I’m probably slightly slower typing on it than I would be on a normal keyboard, but there’s not a lot in it. Being able to use it with my iPhone would effectively turn it into the smallest NetBook going!

As @mezzoblue pointed out on Twitter this evening, the current iPhone is roughly the same spec as a laptop was in 2000 - 256MB RAM, 30GB hard drive and a 600MHz processor. Add a keyboard to it and it becomes as useful as that laptop. It’s hard to see why Apple would want to deny people this.

My Twitter followers and denizens of Milliways will know that my MacBook Pro died while I was at my sister's on Friday. There was no video from either the built-in display or via the external DVI port and the machine would alternate between failing the POST and booting successfully with no video.

Fortunately, there are two Apple Stores on the way home from Maidstone - at Bluewater and Lakeside - so I dropped in to the Bluewater one, only to discover that it would take them two weeks to replace the logic board. They suggested I go to the Regent Street store the following day, but as I was going past Lakeside anyway, I tried there. Their estimate was 3-5 days, so I left the machine with them. It was indeed 3 days - on Monday evening, their website confirmed that my laptop was ready for collection.

I went down to pick it up this morning, having booked an appointment to see a "Genius" so I could get them to take a look at the optical drive. It took them another couple of hours to swap that, so I went and had a coffee and then came back to play with the various shiny toys in the Apple Store while I waited.

On getting the machine home, I discovered that as the internal ethernet port is built in to the logic board, the machine's MAC address had changed. I quickly updated the dhcpd.conf on my server and then discovered that this also prevented Time Machine from using my existing backup.

A bit of googling revealed a Mac OS X Hints post on the subject, but having followed those instructions I discovered that it was still creating a brand new backup.

At this point, I thought I'd give Apple phone support a try and called the number for the Lakeside Apple Store. Unsurprisingly, when I'd fought my way through the IVR system, I was put through to Bombay Bob (as one of my customers always refers to Indian tech support). I explained the problem and he kept not listening to me, telling me on several occasions to configure "Time Capsule" (the Apple proprietary wireless NAS), which I don't have.

Eventually, after over 10 minutes of being utterly useless, he put me on hold. After five minutes of hold music, I got "The other person has cleared" as he hung up.

Fortunately, after a few more minutes looking at the problem, I was able to solve it myself, but I am very unimpressed with Apple's phone support. It's a good job their in-store support is rather better.

The problem was that I had missed the third step of the process:

$ sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:1a:2b:3c:4f:56 Backups.backupdb/MyMac

because Safari 4 didn't render it. I've submitted a bug to Apple.

The snow that fell on Sunday and yesterday is already nearly gone as it's been about 3°C for most of today. I did have time to make a snowman before it started warming up yesterday evening, but it really wasn't very good. There were some excellent ones over on the cycling forum I'm an admin of though.

Snow is always a bit disappointing for me because it's never since been a good as it was when I was seven. Here's what I wrote in my diary on 12th January 1987:

On Monday the 12th of January 1987 we had two feet of snow and the temperature was minus ten all day. Dad, Ellen and I all went for a walk and I kept on throwing snowballs at dad. When he threw them at us, we (Ellen and I) kept on falling in the snow on purpose. We went to see Heather Crisp and she gave us two handfulls of toffees, one for me and one for Ellen, but we shared them out.

Bournemouth Park Road (Where it was cleared) looked like short bread laid out baking on the road. But really it wasn't baking it was freezing!

(Yes, I have socks on my hands - I'd run out of dry gloves)

The most impressive thing about the snow in 1987 was when it started to thaw and there were giant icicles hanging from everyone's gutters. I imagine there would have been a good number of insurance claims for detached guttering after that.

I previously considered frosty something of a role model in terms of being organised and getting things done. His "Procrastination and That" talk was excellent and introduced me to the concept of Getting Things Done (GTD).

When I first watched his talk, I downloaded FlexTime and tried the (10 + 2) * 5 dash but even before my 30 day trial had run out, I'd got fed up of having my work interrupted every ten minutes and gave up on the idea of dashes. The thing is - if you've got yourself into the right frame of mind to work, you don't need any cunning techniques: you can just sit down and get on with it.

However, frosty has been awarded 343 green bananas (link only works for logged-in SUCS members) by rollercow - one per day since the talks in February last year - because he still hasn't uploaded the videos for them. While I could spend the rest of this post bitching at frosty, it would hardly be fair to do so - we all suffer from this problem. Hell, even the David Allen Company, who you'd expect to do better than most people, only put out one podcast episode in the whole of 2008. And I certainly have no room to talk - I only wrote two blog entries last year!

I find that I go through phases of being super-efficient and organised and then switch to being utterly lazy. Maybe it's a mild SAD-related thing. There's an easy way to tell if I'm in the utterly lazy phase - there'll be a load of email sitting in my inbox unfiled.

$ ls -l /var/spool/mail/dez
-rw-rw---- 1 dez mail 608 Jan 27 20:16 /var/spool/mail/dez

So I'm doing OK at the moment... :-)

Actually, I've not been doing so well with this blog entry. I had the original idea for it on Monday last week when I was brainstorming possible topics to blog about and I'd intended to have it written by yesterday in plenty of time for the deadline for my 4th entry in the Blog-a-week competition, but I spent all of yesterday afternoon drafting the new design for the Big Red Design website. Still, at least I was doing something useful.

Being self-employed makes it very easy to ignore things that you really ought to do especially when there's no-one else to enforce a deadline on you. Sometimes even where there is an external deadline, of course, you can find yourself putting it off until the last minute but in general, you do get it done. I think I've had my website redesign on my to do list pretty much since I first installed Things. I even started a design towards the end of August, but it lost momentum and I never finished it.

The old "Give a busy person a job" thing is definitely true - indeed, my current bout of being efficient was triggered by getting a new web design client. Of course the trick is to manage to remain busy, keep the momentum up and sustain the efficient period as long as possible.

I'm now on Twitter. I'd previously been reluctant to join for the exact same reason my dad and sister quoted back at me this lunchtime - why would anyone care what I'm doing? But of course, that's not what it's really about.

As a web designer, I obviously need to keep my skills up to date and even in the short time I've been using Twitter I've learned some useful stuff by following people like Hicksdesign, Molly Holzschlag, Ryan Carson and Paul Boag. These are all people whose sites I've read in the past but of course remembering to check them regularly is the hard bit. Twitter helps becase you're receiving links to content in near-realtime direct from the authors.

I've spent a bit of time looking for a decent app to tweet (submit entries) with and the best I've come across so far is Twitterific. I had been playing with TwitterAdium to get my Adium status updated automatically, but I just discovered Twitterific will do it for me. As TwitterAdium checked my status every 2 minutes, the combination of Twitterific and it quickly ate through my API allowance. I also had a look at a few Dashboard widgets, but they were all of a fixed (and rather small) size, meaning I couldn't see more than one or two tweets at a time.

Texting to update my twitter status is definitely out as T-Mobile charge 20p a text message. Apparently, it's an Isle of Man number, which while looking exactly like a normal UK mobile number, gets counted by T-Mobile as an international call and therefore is not included in my Flext allowance. Sneaky bastards.

I've had a pretty good day today - I've got quite a lot done. It's always a satisfying feeling when I manage to empty the Today section in Things.

Killing two birds with one stone, I added all the letters from local MPs that have been cluttering up my desk for the last few weeks to the SAEN and SEEFoE websites. I also went down to the airport and took some photos, one of which I then used in the design for a leaflet SAEN will be distributing when the second phase of the JAAP consultation finally gets started. Given current economic situation and the large number of redundancies at the airport following the collapse of Flightline, though, there has to be some doubt about whether Eddie Stobart will want to go ahead with the airport expansion plans - particularly as the airport would then cost them an extra £5 million.

I was particularly pleased with the WordPress plugin I wrote this evening for the Marine Reserves website. EDM 337 is supportive of the campaign's aims and I wanted to show on the website how many MPs have signed it. In the typical way that the Government does everything IT-related badly, there's no nice RSS feed of this information, so I have to scrape it from the EDM page directly. In order to make it more efficient, I cache the resulting value and only fetch it again if it's been more than 12 hours since I last got it. The information is then stored in the Wordpress database. Not bad for the first plugin I've ever written, I reckon! You can download it if you want, not that it's likely to be much use to you. :-)

Following the realisation that I only made two blog entries during the whole of 2008, I resolved to do better this year and when I read that a band of SUCS-related ne'er-do-wells are having a "Blog-a-Week" competition, I thought I might as well give it a go. Willwel is keeping track of everyone's posts on this calendar. So that's another thing achieved - my second Blog-a-Week!

Even though I'm not likely to use it for myself, inevitably, I am going to have to know about Windows 7 in order to provide support to customers, friends and relatives. It never hurts to be a step ahead of the game, so I decided to download it this evening and have a play with it in the relative safety of a Parallels Virtual Machine on my Mac.

The first problem was downloading it. As a company wanting users to do some of their testing for them, you'd kind-of expect Microsoft to want to make it easy to get hold of their beta software. Go to the Windows 7 beta download page in Safari, and give it a Windows Live login and it just sits there whirling green dots round and round indefinitely. So I tried Camino. It let me log on, but then the download button wouldn't work. Firefox was the same.

Eventually, I gave in and started up an XP VM and tried in IE. It turned out it wanted to install an Active X Download Manager thing by Akamai. I left it downloading while I took the dog for his late-night walk.

By the time I'd got back, all 3.15GB of it had downloaded (I do love having a 20Mbit connection :-) ) and so I'm now starting the installation process.

The first thing I notice when I reach the "Install Windows" screen is that already there's an inconsistent UI. The "Install Windows" window has XP-style decorations, whereas when you click on "What to know before installing Windows", you get Vista-style window decorations - the wide red close button, the rounded window corners and some sort of stripey grey background. Worse, it gives you instructions for "Installing Windows Vista". Well that'll be an "F" for attention to detail then...

I accept the license agreement and create a new partition using all of the 32GB virtual drive Parallels created. Windows tells me that it might want to create extra partitions, so I say "OK" and it creates a 200MB partition at the beginning of the drive. It then gets on with the installation.

Two restarts later, you get told that "Setup is preparing your computer for first use", "Setup is checking video performance" and then you're setting your username and computer name. You're then invited to "Type a password (recommended)" and "Type a password hint (required)". Surely that's the wrong way round! Having set my hint to "Mind your own business", I move on. It now wants the Product Key and unfortunately I don't seem to be able to get Parallels to paste it from the OS X clipboard. It invites me to automatically activate Windows and then asks me to "Help protect your computer and improve Windows automatically". Might as well go for the recommended settings. It asks me for my time zone and then finalises the settings.

After some autofrobbing with the desktop settings, I'm presented with a desktop with a rather strange-looking blue and red fish on it. An alert in my system tray tells me to "View important messages", so I do. It's whining about a lack of virus protection. I install Parallels Tools, which wakes the network card up. I opt to share all my files, music, videos and pictures and it gives me a "password to add other computers to your homegroup." In the meantime, Parallels Tools seems to have got stuck at "Registering Host Applications...". There's a fair amount of hard disc activity and Task Manager tells me it's still running, so I leave it to it. Eventually it tells me the installation was successful.

Having followed Apple's advice repeatedly to clean the ball on my Mighty Mouse, today, it came to the point where this would no longer work.

Following the rather more drastic advice of mightymouserepair.com, I soon got the mouse apart and found the cause of the problem: 

There's no way that rubbing with a damp cloth would ever have got all of this out.

Fortunately, I was able to prise the plastic ring off the base of the mouse with my Swiss Army Knife with no cosmetic damage to the mouse and then glue it back in place with silicone glue, as recommended by the website. However, Apple really should have designed the device so that it could be taken apart and cleaned by the user more easily.

Yesterday, I took advantage of the "Mac Heist" deal that's currently on. One of the programs included is iStopMotion - stop motion video software. I've wanted to have a go at stop motion animation since I did GCSE Art (I had wanted to animate the scene from the BFG where he blew dreams into peoples' bedroom windows). I still have the models I made for that somewhere, so perhaps I'll give that a go at some point. For now though, here's my first attempt:

Flashback to 3rd September:

09:24 Dez: Morning
09:24 Dez: This is ungood
09:24 Dez: I turned my monitor on this morning to find that my mac had crashed
09:24 Dez: I turned it off, turned it on again and after about 5 minutes of it sitting on the grey screen with the whirly whirling, I turned it off
09:25 Dez: Left if a few minutes and turned it on again
09:25 Dez: I come back to find that I've been given a root prompt
09:26 frosty: dez: ooh :/
09:29 Dez: fro> know what the appropriate fsck equivalent is?
09:29 frosty: dez: nope, sorry
09:30 rollercow: dez: fsck oddly enough
09:30 Dez: rc:
09:30 Dez: ** /dev/rdisk0s3
09:30 Dez: BAD SUPER BLOCK: MAGIC NUMBER WRONG
09:31 Dez: LOOK FOR ALTERNATE SUPERBLOCKS? [yn]
09:31 FireFury: dez: sounds like your hard disk may have exploded
09:31 rollercow: dez: thats generaly not good

I tried several more times to boot and fsck, all to no avail and so bit the bullet and ordered a new hard drive - opting for a 160GB model rather than simply getting an identical 80GB replacement.

I then set about opening my Mac Mini's case in order to allow me to replace the drive when it arrived and discovered that the RAM in it was identical in specification to that in my PC. It had been suggested by sits that it might be the RAM and not the hard drive that had failed, so I swapped the RAM over and lo and behold, the machine booted as normal with no problems at all.

So I didn't need a new hard drive after all. Still, the extra space would be very helpful - every time I want to do anything video related, I have to make space on the drive by moving things onto other machines.

I had a look at finding some replacement RAM, found a suitably-priced 1GB stick and ordered it.

I decided to take photos of the process of installing the new hardware as on my first attempt at opening the case, following rather unclear instructions I found online, I mistakenly attempted (and succeeded :-/ ) in removing the shiny plastic top of my mac mini, rather than the chassis. 

I was going to write a blog entry on Tuesday describing my first week with the Nokia 770. Just before I was about to start, I installed a package that broke the machine to such an extent that I had to reflash it and start from scratch. I decided to leave writing the blog entry until I had got the system stable again - which has taken until today.

As I was reflashing the device, I decided to take the opportunity to try out IT2007 Hacker Edition on the basis that if I didn't like it, it would be a simple matter to flash back to IT2006 and I wouldn't have wasted a lot of time installing software on IT2006 only to lose it all when I finally decided to give IT2007 a go.

I was pleased with how quickly the device flashed and in very short order, I had IT2007 HE in front of me. I was quite surprised to find that IT2007 was a vast improvement over IT2006 - a lot of the rather badly designed or ill-thought-out components had been improved a great deal and it didn't take very long at all for me to realise that I wanted to stick with IT2007.

Because it was designed for the Nokia n800 - the newer Internet Tablet - there were some packages I found you couldn't install on the Nokia 770, and worse, some that would install quite happily only for you to discover on your next reboot that the device would no longer successfully boot and instead go into a "boot loop" where it would get part-way through the boot process before failing and starting again. Once the device got into this state, there was nothing to do but reflash again.

Very quickly, I got pretty tired of reflashing and having to install all the packages I wanted again so I started looking for a backup solution. The OS comes with a backup tool, but this only preserves your settings and user data - not any of the applications you have installed. I came across a Makefile written by Andrew Flegg which used rsync to back the device up. However, this was specifically tailored to IT2005 and wouldn't work with either IT2006 or IT2007. After adjusting what the script backed up, I had something that was rather more useful to me and after a few experiments (and several more reflashes), I had a system that would reliably back up all the files on the device (excluding devices, temporary files and caches) and restore them to the device after a reflash.

After lots of experimenting, testing and backing up, I got to a stage where most of what I wanted was installed and I was very pleased. That was until I discovered that one of the packages I'd installed had stopped my arrow keys from working - not only on my Bluetooth keyboard, but on the device as well! I thought I was going to have to reflash and start installing again, until it occurred to me that I could reflash, take an independent backup of the newly-flahsed device (where the arrow keys worked), flash back to the backup where they didn't then copy bits from the "clean" backup over the newer files until I found the cause of the problem and could resolve it. It turned out that it was the files in /usr/share/X11/xkb that broke the arrow keys. Once I knew this, it was a simple matter of restoring from the full backup in which the arrow keys didn't work, copying that dir over the top then taking a new backup.

Then I discovered that gpsd didn't work. I had spent quite a while playing with kismet when I was running IT2006 and produced a map of local wifi APs in Google Earth using some python written by FireFury. Having spent £80 on a GPS kit, I wasn't going to settle for it not working. It turned out the cause was that the gpsd supplied with IT2007 simply doesn't run on the 770. Going back to the gpsd I found for IT2006 (which was a lot of effort in itself), I extracted the files and copied them over those in IT2007 and thankfully got it working.

So now, I have finally - nearly two weeks after receiving the device - got it working how I want.

Installation notes I made during the process can be found in the SUCS Knowledge base.

This blog entry was entirely written using my Nokia 770.