What's it all about, Alfie?

I just got a tweet from MarsEdit to say that 3.0.4 is out with a few nice little changes - especially for the rich text editor users:

• Fix a bug that caused strange ? characters at ends of pasted paragraphs
• Fix Drupal authentication issues by preserving cookies when connecting
• Fixes to Tags field to handle whitespace better, and keep insertion point visible

As a WordPress user, I'm not really hit by this, and I don't use the rich text editor, but it's nice to see improvements. It's been a slow week, and any reason to work on my Mac is a welcome one.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev was updated to 6.0.458.1 and the release notes are once again, a little sketchy. It's nice that it seems to be slowing down - maybe that means the 6.x release line is nearing completion. Then again, it could just mean work is slowing down.

In any case, it's good to keep up to date on something that is changing so quickly.

It's not updated often, and I suppose that's a good thing, but this morning I noticed that Growl 1.2.1 got updated this past weekend with a rather impressive list of changes. The Growl team seems to be a little miffed that several applications (DropBox, Adobe Creative Suite) are installing Growl as a part of their installations, and it's a little sneaky and underhanded in their book. I can understand their concerns - to a point. People see something in their systems that they didn't install, and it's not clear to them that it's because of something they did install. It can be annoying support emails. Not good.

But if someone wanted to include that functionality, and it's explicitly made open source, then it's really a shame that you can't "tag" it as part of a larger install package. Like "Growl for DrpoBox" in the name. Then, at least, it'll give the users a good idea what's going on and why that might be installed on their systems.

Anyway, I like it, and it's nice to see the improvements.

Once again the happy boys at Panic have updated Transmit 4.0.6 and in this release there's several more significant issues fixed, but the overall count of changes isn't nearly as significant as the last release. Things seem to be slowing down a bit at Panic HQ. Still, it's great to see the improvements.

OK, I'm as big an Apple fanboy as they come - I think it's for good reason, but that doesn't mean that other people see things my way. I was reading Daring Fireball this morning and came across this iPhone vs HTC Evo cartoon that's just about the funniest thing I think I've seen in months. It takes a little bit to get going, but the guy's response to the near mindless desire for an iPhone 4 by someone that doesn't have the first real clue about why, is just priceless.

Give it a watch...

I've got a 1TB external drive for my Time Machine backups, but I know that someday soon, I'll need to upgrade it to larger space. When I do, I'll probably go with a very large drive system - say 4TB or more, and I want to move all my old Time Machine data to the new disk. I've done this a few times in the past, but I wanted to have a single place where I had all the instructions so I didn't have to worry about forgetting what sites I used, etc.

So here it is:

1. After attaching, formatting (Mac Journaled), and naming the new drive, launch Time Machine and switch it off.
2. Unmount the current Time Machine drive by dragging it to the Trash. Remount it by either turning it off and then on again, or mounting it with Disk Utility. You do this so it loses its Time Machine icon and appears with the typical orange external drive icon.
3. Launch Disk Utility, select the old drive, and click on the Restore tab.
4. Drag the Time Machine partition from the old drive to the Source field in the Restore tab. Drag the new drive’s partition (assuming there’s just the one partition) to the Destination field.
5. Enable the Erase Destination option and click the Restore button.
6. Wait while Disk Utility does its job (this can take several hours).
7. When the job is done you’ll see two identical volumes on the Desktop. Unmount and disconnect the one that shows a capacity of 500GB (the old drive).
8. With the new drive mounted, open Time Machine and switch it on. Click on Select Disk and direct Time Machine to the new drive that contains your copied Time Machines backup.

Time Machine should do the right thing and use that drive for its backups. Should you need to restore you’ll find that all your old backed up data is on this new drive.

Since I've upgraded my iPhone 3GS to iOS 4, I've been trying to see if it's acting better, the same, or worse than before. I have to say that the Mail app and syncing to GMail with Exchange did not work well at all yesterday. Messages weren't getting to my upgraded phone, and for several hours I wondered if it was going to be broken until we got iOS 4.0.1. It was bad.

Then the camera app wasn't working really well last night, and I was convinced that this wasn't all that great an update for the 3GS hardware. But I'm coming around this morning. I power-cycled the phone, and things are a little better. The camera is better, and email is OK. But there's a wrinkle - the upgrade allowed Google to set the "auto-lock" on my phone to: "1 Minute".

Not good. I just needed to go into Settings, then General, then change it, but by default, it's going to auto-lock your phone. It's simple to fix, but if you didn't know, it could really fluster you. Glad I read about this. I'll know what to do when upgrading Liza's phone.

This morning I saw that VLC 1.1.0 was out, and thought I'd give it a look-see to see if they had picked up enough Mac OS X developer support to be able to build a 64-bit VLC on Mac, as I'm a huge fan of Handbrake, and it needs the libdvdcss that's included with VLC - but I needed the 64-bit version. Up till now, I've been using the last 64-bit build of VLC which is the 1.0.4rc release - quite old.

So this morning I downloaded 1.1.0 - which claims to be 32/64 on the web site, and then open up the app wrapper, and look. Holy Cow! it's got the FAT binary for libdvdcss which is now i386 and x86_64! Incredible! I'm able to replace 1.0.4rc with the latest shipping 1.1.0 and still keep the 64-bit Handbrake.

What a luck break for me! Super glad I checked.

I saw that iOS 4 was finally on iTunes, and was able to upgrade my iPhone 3GS! I'm excited about all the new features, and then the iPhone 4 that's supposed to be steaming it's way to me in the very near future. Very exciting times!

I'm expecting a slightly sluggish response on my iPhone 3GS, but it shouldn't be too bad. It's supposed to be capable of handling all the features, and there's not a ton that's really taxing on the new OS right now... but we'll have to see.

UPDATE: as I've been using the new iOS, I've noticed that my 3GS is not nearly as responsive as it used to be. The camera app, specifically, has had major delays in processing. Now I don't know exactly why this is, but it's not something I'm really happy to see. Kind of a let-down.

[6/22] UPDATE: I power-cycled my phone this morning, and ran a few critical tests. Additionally, I've read several other reports, and it seems that my initial problems really were transient, and it's far better now. Glad to see the rebound.

OK, this is a little funny, but I just saw that there's another release of Google Chrome (dev) for the Mac! Amazing. There's nothing new on the release notes, but that's not a total surprise. There seems to be some issues with crashing, but I've honestly not seen a group as big as Google move this fast in a very long time. There must have been something really wrong with the 6.0.437.2 build.

So it goes. I'm glad to know that it's auto-updating just fine now, which is a big relief.