Alyn Family » apple

Yikes! A few days without an update!

egg — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 02:56:09 +0000

Last week Vince and Jan came for a brief visit before heading on to see Christopher. We checked out Mayo and the downtown subway. The kids were ecstatic to see them. We had a nice visit and celebrated their 10th anniversary at Michaels on Thursday. The house is almost back together after the holiday and it’s getting back to life as usual here in MN. I bottled the MrBeer homebrew last Saturday. Sunday while Gretchen nursed a cold, Oskar and I worked on a photo booth for taking macro photographs of stuff for eBay and I caught up for dinner with Joe Rinehart on Sunday. I’ve been working too much this week, pulling 16 hours Monday and probably 12 by the end of today and was able to have Joe over to the house for dinner. I guess the end of the month makes it all worth it. Last but not least, we converted Kathy to Mac… so Kevin and Rachel – your the last stand for PC.

Did I Mention You Should Make a Backup?

egg — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:49:19 +0000

It only took 6 short hours to re-install Windows Vista on my Mac. I recommend you backup any virtual disk images for Parallels you have now – because that took FOREVER! It was an oversight of mine from the hard drive failure. There was nothing important as far as “data” on the volume, but man, what a pain… Install XP, Upgrade to Vista, patch Vista, Install Supporting Apps (like Flash/Firefox etc). I’m creating an archive and copying it off to the backup disk now…

New Apple Ad

egg — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:12:34 +0000

Okay, so I’m an Apple fanboy, I admit it. But how couldn’t you be when the ads are just so great!

Laptop Hard Drive Failure :(

egg — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 03:53:13 +0000

When it rains it pours. It seems I’ve been having a bout of technological bad luck this year. Generally I count myself fortunate that technology seems to work for my 98% of the time. However, this last Monday, my luck changed. For the second time this year I lost a hard drive in one of my machines. In May it was the G4 desktop‘s data disk (it was configured with a data volume and a system volume). Fortunately I keep pretty regular backups and so all that was lost was some free iTunes videos and my music library which I was able to recover off of my iPod. This time the drive was sort of usable, which was good because I didn’t have a recent backup. I was able to mount it with Firewire target disk mode to the desktop and save most of the important files. As luck would have it, the iTunes library was gone as well as a few random photos taken with PhotoBooth. Generally, I consider my losses minor – besides, Oskar’s iPod had most of that music. I also took this as an opportunity to save myself the hassle of calling Apple Support for hours on end and upgrading the capacity and the spindle speed as well. Based on findings of similar upgrades others have done (before a complete failure) they experienced disk performance increases of at least 30%. I also upped the capacity to 200Gb which should give me some extra room for all of my missing iTunes music! I purchased the drive from ifixit.com, which I’ve used in the past. They offer great guides for assisting with the process and have pretty much any part you could want for your Apple laptop or iPod.

iWant: iPod Touch >= 32Gb

egg — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:24:24 +0000

Yes, I realize this hasn’t been released (or even announced for that matter) but I still want one. I suspect they’re going to be pricey when they are finally released but please, oh please Apple, release a high capacity version, I’ve been waiting for 2 years to upgrade!