June 10th, 2011
After poking around in some of its not-all-the-way working things on iCloud, I found a couple of things that I did not expect. And for reference, I have one Mac running iTunes and an iPhone 3GS.
1. When they say you can re-download any of your purchased music, they mean only purchased music. If you got a redemption code for music, you won’t be included in the re-downloading.
2. Apps, free or purchased, can be re-downloaded. This is also a quick way to free up space on your iPod/iPhone/iPad.
3. Obsolete apps or apps you deleted are in the iCloud. Expect to have a list much longer than what you expect. Apple kept a list of everything you ever bought, even if you deleted it off every one of your iDevices.
4. Instapaper Free isn’t in the iCloud. It’s not surprising, but it shows that if you bought something that got pulled, Apple respects the developer rather than the purchaser. Not that one or the other is the right thing to do, but as long as I still have a pulled app on a hard drive somewhere, I’ll still have the app.
5. Other apps that have been pulled are in the iCloud. Including banned ones.
May 13th, 2011
Today somebody told me that, after my dinner I should go and read a book on a front–porch swing. It didn’t even have to be mine. Just enjoy the night.
While trespassing.
Couldn’t have happened on a better day.
Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th.1 Yes, I’m breaking weeks–long silence to talk about this again.
- I certainly like it better than friggatriskaidekaphobia. Not that friggatriskaidekaphobia is a bad word, or anything. I just like paraskevidekatriaphobia better. If it were possible, of course, for to one could like that sort of thing. ↩
April 5th, 2011
Brent Simmons is somebody I’ve admired for years, mostly because he’s an affable chap, and the creator and curator of NetNewsWire. Of all the developers in the world, he’s one of them. Seriously, he’s somebody that I‘ve grown to trust over the years.
Lately he’s been going on about how some blogs just can’t stand massive amounts of traffic. His solution is to get rid of the middle–man. I agree, and I’ve spent several hours of several days playing around with these flat–file systems. It’s how I started back in those dinosaur days of the 1990s.
But his frustration flared again yesterday as he lashed out at blogs who can’t keep themselves afloat:
Twice today I’ve tried to go to sites that couldn’t handle the traffic from Daring Fireball. This is preposterous.
Indeed. But in a moment of rare clarity, I devised an even better scheme to keep your site from buckling under the massive weight of internet traffic the likes of whom only the mightiest of servers can stand. Instead of serving some sort of cache–crazy database system, or some luddite–enabling text file architecture, my solution is simple, and the most effective way to make sure that you blog never succumbs to massive traffic from the Gruber:
Suck.1
That’ll keep you blog safe. That strategy has kept this blog (and many others) safe from massive (or any) traffic for years now.
- Except, of course, if you’re Rob Enderle. Sucking is more of his raison d’être. ↩
March 12th, 2011
Checking my Notes app after updating to the shiny new iOS 4.3, I found that something was amiss. Instead of Marker Felt, the fonts were all messed up. It looked familiar, but I coudn’t believe they just up and changed from Marker Felt to something else. I had to look a couple of times, really, because I’m in Notes constantly.
So I went to the Notes preferences to make sure I hadn’t messed something up. I was hoping that I didn’t have some mystery font cache problem that completely destroyed my iPhone. That’s when I saw this.
Yep. Helvetica. You can now use Helvetica in Notes. It’s defaulted to Noteworthy for some reason, and even that somehow looks wrong.
I should warn you, Helvetica in Notes doesn’t look great, either. It is, however, less terrible than Marker Felt. But it’s nice to see that somebody at Apple finally listened, and at least now you have some choice.
March 8th, 2011
People really don’t want the new Admin Bar introduced in WordPress version 3.1. What I’m finding out is that people just don’t understand how easy it is to turn off without destroying the functionality. Took me all of 30 seconds to figure this out.
Inside the Admin interface (when you’re logged in), look for something like this up in the top right corner:
Clicking that link, it’ll take you to your personal preferences. Scroll down that page and you’ll find something like this:
Make sure those two are unchecked and it’ll go away. You’ll probably need to reload your site a couple of times because it relies on Javascript, and your browser will cache the file. Reload until the Admin Bar disappears.