Words of Advice Before Upgrading to iOS 5 and iCloud

Posted on October 12, 2011 by romkey

Today is a big day for Apple. The iPhone 4S is shipping and Apple is doing one of its biggest set of software updates ever. Today they’ll be releasing iOS 5 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. They’ll also be releasing MacOS X 10.7.2, introducing iCloud, and releasing updates for iTunes (out yesterday, actually), iPhoto, Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

iCloud is the glue that binds many of these updates together. iCloud replaces MobileMe (formerly .Mac) and is Apple’s solution to the synchronization problem – your data lives on iCloud and changes are automatically made available to your computers and devices, so you can do some work on your computer and simply find it available to you on your phone or iPad or another computer without having to do any synchronization.

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I Hadn’t Expected It To Be So Dusty

Posted on August 30, 2011 by romkey

Although I hadn’t expected a flood, either. I usually think of hurricanes sitting off the coast and dumping on Cape Cod and Boston (if they ever get that far). I don’t think of them as chewing their way up through Vermont. Of course that’s the perspective of a former Boston resident.

Like so many disasters and crises, the worst effects didn’t actually manifest until after the actual event had ended. Irene had moved on past us but the rivers continued rising.

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iPhone Tethering

Posted on June 6, 2011 by romkey

Free Wifi is great, isn’t it? Except when it’s worth exactly what you paid for it: nothing.

I often have difficulty with hotel wifi. It drops out, you can’t get an IP address, the bandwidth is next to nothing. Forget about streaming Netflix over it, you’re lucky if you can check your email.

Over the weekend we were at a pleasant small hotel whose wifi was utter crap. It barely worked for Mike on his 15″ MacBook Pro, and my smaller MacBook Air was only able to make use of it twice.

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iTunes Hygiene

Posted on May 23, 2011 by romkey

Instead of working on a site redesign that I have a tight deadline on, I am dealing with a long-standing peeve I’ve had: iTunes hygiene.

This isn’t really a problem with iTunes so much as it is a problem with normalizing band names. iTunes’ search is quite smart, and matches similar items even when there are minor differences between them. So “Sigur Ros” and “Sigur Rós” will show up when I search for “ros”.

Its sorting in displays of music is clever as well. If I’m sorting on artist iTunes will cleverly show me “The Doors” intermingled with “Doors”.

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I’m a Finalist in a Fitness Contest

Posted on May 18, 2011 by romkey

Screen shot 2011 05 18 at 5.09.14 PM Im a Finalist in a Fitness Contest I had the most amazing news today: I’m a finalist in a fitness contest. That’s something I would never have expected to be writing.

From August 2010 through January 2011, I participated in Precision Nutrition’s online “Lean Eating” program. I’ve been meaning to write something about this but the time hadn’t felt right.

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