… is the little Time Machine icon in the menu bar. It saves a Dock space as I can access everything I need to do with Time Machine in a much more compact way.

The new Stacks stuff is nice, but while I use Stacks, I don’t use it for collections of enough items to warrant using the new list view.

One thing I might like back, though, is the ability to put an icon for my home folder on the right side of the Dock that with one click opens ~ in Finder. Yes, I know, I could click the Finder icon at the left, but that works ever so slightly differently; it might focus an existing Finder window.

Did anyone else notice the TM backup done straight after 10.5.2 took ages to ‘prepare’? I understand why, because there were a lot of individual files that changed in the update, and it had to query the FSEvents database to list all those changes, but I wonder if anyone else experienced that step taking 20 minutes or more.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that The Times Magazine for the 9th February includes a section on the latest internet meme of FAIL (page 12, left hand box if you’re interested).

I was not so pleasantly surprised to notice that half way down, you are invited to “Visit timesonline.co.uk/microtrends for an epic shipment of fail”.

Why? Well, in my opinion, FAIL is subject to special grammar requirements. It should have been “a shipment of epic fail”, not “an epic shipment of fail”.

The lack of capitalisation also concerns me, but it might be a little harsh to be critical on that point as well – and the capitalisation of the word isn’t necessarily a set-in-stone rule, either.

You can read the article that appears in print over on their site.

I’m not going to make predictions per se, because they’ll be wrong.

I am going to list what I’d like to see announced by good old Mr Jobs in tomorrow’s keynote. Well, OK, they are sort of predictions, but they are more than likely very inaccurate and I take no responsibility if I end up looking stupid this time tomorrow.

• A new MacBook of some sort, but please don’t call it the MacBook Air. Not just a minor bump, something big and new.
• iTunes Movie Rentals – this one’s been on the cards for a while, and I think it’s happening tomorrow. Maybe just Disney to start with? 😉
• News about the iPhone and iPod Touch SDK and/or 1.1.3.
• Something that no-one’s expecting and no-one predicted (pretty much can’t go wrong with that one, can I?!).

So, by this time tomorrow, things will be kicking off (if I’ve done my time calculations correctly). We’ll see!

Firefox on the Mac is, well, it doesn’t always fit in quite as well with the Mac as it could – and it feels like that’s always been the case.

Firefox 3 is meant to start changing that, and making Firefox feel like a first class citizen on OS X. Having heard Jacob’s singing praise for the beta’s integration with GTK on Linux, I thought I’d download the Mac build and give it a try.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is real native buttons. Instead of Windows 95-style boxy buttons, native Mac buttons are now used, unless the website specifies specific button colours, in which case those colours and styles are used on the standard boxy buttons (exactly the same as Safari 3 now does).

There’s also a new theme available, called Proto. It doesn’t ship with the beta, but is linked to from the welcome page you get. And this is what it looks like:

» Read the rest of this post…

So I’m downloading the WebKit source code which I need for an upcoming FOSSwire tutorial. Downloading it from SVN is painfully slow, but then I can’t remember SVN checkouts ever having been that fast.

There’s another option to download – grabbing a .tar.bz2 of the latest nightly. Downloading that over HTTP is, guess what, also painfully slow.

The top speed this connection can do on download is around 250 Kbytes per second. It’s downloading at less than 10% of that capacity, with no other activity on the connection. Downloads from other sites run much faster. Now it might just be me, but I can’t help thinking Apple are either not putting enough resources into WebKit.org, or they’re deliberately degrading the download experience.

I hope for their sake it’s the former, and if so, come on Apple, put some resources into it! You wouldn’t have a base for Safari if it wasn’t for the open source community, so let’s be nice back shall we?

Of all of the new features in Leopard, Time Machine definitely looks one of the most significant and as a concept it looks pretty neat.

Over the last few days, I’ve put Time Machine into practice and I’d like to share my thoughts.

• The initial backup after you set it up is a pain. The entire system gets backed up (40 GB in my case, when I’d set it up) and you get an annoying progress window. It doesn’t quite happen in the same ‘in the background’ way it’s promised initially. The initial backup can’t be interrupted either – it’s a good thing it only has to be done once.
• Subsequent backups are completely automated, in the background and incremental. Provided you don’t shift around tons of data in the space of an hour while your drive is connected, there’s very little to back up each hour so it happens virtually instantaneously and you don’t notice it.
• The interface is very eye-candy-y and I think some of the effects can get in the way a little bit when you’re just trying to restore something. However, being able to use the full power of the Spotlight architecture inside your backups is pretty cool and is a real boon when trying to find a specific file from a specific backup.
• A little more configurability with regards to how much disk space Time Machine uses and retention policies would be nice. How it’s done right now does keep it simple, but how hard would it be to implement a slider as to how much of the drive to use. Right now, it means you have to re-partition the drive with a data partition too if you want to do so, as the backup partition is completely monopolised by Time Machine.
• The backups aren’t in some crazy proprietary format – they’re just the files copied to directories on the disk. It’s simple to restore files even without using the Time Machine interface and all your data is nice and accessible. That means if I have a major MacBook catastrophe, I can plug the backup drive into my Linux box, mount the HFS+ partition and copy my files. Interoperability for the win.
• Having backups completely automated is going to save me so much time and effort – and my backups wll be more up-to-date, should I ever have to use them (I haven’t yet on the MacBook).

So, overall – Time Machine is a really cool feature. If they add some more options to configure it just how I like it and maybe offer a toned down interface as well, it will be the most awesome desktop backup solution ever.

I’m gravitating back to it. After a while of using Zooomr, and since what has happened since Mark III, it really isn’t fulfilling my needs; stuff still feels broken, the upload page doesn’t work at all on Firefox on Linux and to be honest, I much prefer how the Mark II architecture worked.

So, back to Flickr I go.

My old account is junked up with rubbish, so I’ve actually gone onto a fresh Yahoo account and created a new Flickr account using it. From now on, you’ll find all my new photos and stuff on my Flickr.

Which is:

flickr.com/photos/peterupfold

And my profile is:

flickr.com/people/peterupfold

Feel free to friend me and all that stuff – I’m too lazy, so come and find me and add me. 🙂

I’ll be needing somewhere to stick the unboxing photos of Leopard. Not that there’s an awful lot of unboxing involved, but I’m not going to break the tradition now, am I? 😉

Unfortunately… there’s no way I’m getting one.

It’s an awesome device with some amazing features and some really really nice applications, but I’m not going to get one. Primarily my reason is I don’t spend anywhere near £35 a month on my phone (and I couldn’t afford to right now anyway). The minimum O2 contract length is 18 months at a minimum of £35 a month.

Let’s do a little maths – £35 * 18 is £630. Plus £269 for the device itself. That’s a grand total of £899. Minimum spend.

Sorry, no iPhone unboxing photos from me, I’m afraid.

As I write this I’m approaching the final stages (I hope) of a Google Reader feed reading marathon. Due to time constraints, I literally haven’t had a chance over the past few days to open it up and catch up with the world.

Now that I am doing so, it becomes a marathon of reading stuff.

Which brings me to an idea – why can’t there be some way to prioritise my feeds? Rank them perhaps, so that when I have limited time I can catch up with the feeds I’m most interested in reading and get the rest later.

This is sort of what products like Particls do I suppose, and said product apparently has some neat algorithms for working out what you find most interesting. While they only have a Windows version and my only Windows installation isn’t hooked up to the internet (I can’t be bothered to maintain it anymore and wouldn’t use it anyway for the annoyance of rebooting to get to everything else), I probably won’t use Particls though.

Additionally, I don’t know whether I’d get annoyed by using both Particls and Google Reader and end up reading duplicate stuff. I’m not a user – so I don’t know whether that would be an issue.

Which is a shame – because I think I’d really like it.

So here’s my idea – get some kind of ranking system built in to Google Reader so I can go for a quick 10-minute catch up hit on the most important stuff and come back to the rest later when I have time.

Either that or get me Particls for OS X or Linux (preferably both and with the data synced 😉 ).

Or maybe just cut down on the amount of content I’m consuming.

Not again.

Intellectual Property Assurance
Through the agreement, Microsoft and Linspire have developed a framework to provide patent covenants for Linspire customers. The patent covenants provide customers with confidence that the Linspire technologies they use come with rights to relevant Microsoft patents. As well, Linspire now joins a growing group of open source software (OSS) distributors collaborating with Microsoft on efforts to establish rich interoperability, deliver IP assurance to customers and build the bridge between open source and proprietary software.

For Microsoft, the agreement is the latest in a series of collaborations with Linux platform and OSS providers. This list of collaborators includes JBoss, LG Electronics, Novell, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Xandros Inc., XenSource Inc. and Zend Technologies Inc.

I now refuse to run Linspire as well. I feel really strong about this – I refuse to let Microsoft have any influence over my Linux system. They have plenty of industry influence already and every deal like this just makes me more livid.

The strangest thing about this deal?

Linspire will select the Live Search service of Windows Live as the Linspire 5.0 default Web search engine, allowing Microsoft to bring Live Search to a broader set of users and providing leading search capabilities to Linspire customers.

Seems a bit ironic they’re setting a search engine which on the UK version can’t find the FSF on a query for ‘free software’ as the default. On what is supposed to be a free software operating system (but arguably isn’t anymore).