We got my sister-in-law an iPad for mother’s day. She needed something that would be able to access all her computer needs, but small enough to be able to pack into a diaper bag and talk to the cell network when she’s at the karate class with her daughter.

But I had a deeper ploy in there as well: Facetime.

Facetime is Apple’s video conferencing system that works on the iOS devices. The beauty isn’t that it’s Apple or that it’s video conferencing. The beauty is how simple it is to use.

Chatting with her and the kids made it worth while. Alaina was a bit spooked at first, but quickly got the jist of how things were working.

Then, an hour later, my mom Facetimes with her new iPod touch.

Win.

Epic win.

Simple to use and tends to work. That’s what I like.

I had a Zagg keyboard for my original iPad and I wanted one for my new (third-generation) one. The original keyboard was integrated into a case for the iPad. This was both good and bad.

It was good since the face of the iPad was always protected when not in use. The bad was that you couldn’t just pull out and use the iPad without peeling the case off the iPad, and then you had to put the iPad-sized case somewhere in case you didn’t want to do a lot of typing. Another downside is that the spacebar was somewhat shielded by the side of the case so every once in a while I would miss hitting it.

This time I got another Zagg keyboard: the Zagg Flex. I got it because I wanted the smart cover for the iPad to work — which would preclude a case-type keyboard. I wanted the smart cover so I could use the iPad more to surf than just work.

So far this keyboard is working pretty well. The key pitch is just about the same as the old one. Another advantage is that it’s really rather light. The old one was a chunk of aluminum with an embedded keyboard. Honestly, the old one is as tough as nails. (I ran it over with my motorcycle by accident once) With the durability comes some weight. This keyboard is a lot lighter.

So, how light? With the case that doubles as a stand it weighs in at 328g. Without the stand it’s only 184g. Do I need the case? I’m not sure at the moment… The smart cover doubles as a stand as well… I’m going to try to keep it around to see how much bulk it really adds.

Mostly I’m looking to the future trips we’re planning for the motorcycle. Both weight and bulk are important in that regard.

i’ll revisit this in a few weeks after I’ve used it a bit to see how this combo works out.

Umm… I think that gets chalked up as a fail in my book.

Am I going to delete music to get under the limit? No. Well then, I guess I can’t give Apple my $25.

<sigh/>

The UPS guy delivered my new iPhone to me this morning. I ordered last Friday morning from AT&T when the Apple servers had their regularly scheduled meltdown. I trusted Apple to get to to me more, but the lack of trust in AT&T turned out to be unfounded thankfully.

iOS5

This isn’t a new thing to me since I was using IOS5 for the past few months on the beta program. (Yes, I’m a paid up developer) I can talk about it now though. The new notification system is finally up to par with what the Android ecosystem (and jailbroken phones) had for a while now.

Speed

The first thing I really noticed was the speed. The overall performance of the device seems a lot speedier. There’s noticeably less lag when going between applications. Going from the main screen to being ready to take pictures is substantially faster than before. In the end though the older iteration of the phone wasn’t slow by any means

Siri

I’m not sure how much I’m going to use her, but it’s freakishly cool! I’m sure we’ll have a DamnYouSiri.com (yes, it’s already taken) pop up soon.

“What reindeer sex do you want to get take out from?”

If nothing else I’m really hoping that something like this gets more common. I don’t think that we’ll be able to stop people from texting and driving unfortunately, but if we get it so it’s not as dangerous we’ll be a bit head of the game.

It really does feel futuristic though. “Wake me up in half an hour.”

That being said, as I’m writing this the server end of the Siri service seems to be down or overloaded. I guess everyone else is asking her “What’s the meaning of life” looking for all the different answers.

“All evidence to date suggests it’s chocolate.”

Antenna

The antenna-gate from the iPhone 4 launch has died down. Even with that over a bit more than a year and a half Apple has improved the antenna system quite dramatically. The phone now has diversity transceive (transmit and receive) on two strips of the antenna. I went down to my basement where I typically have zero or one bars of signal strength and I was looking at two bars.

Nice!

Camera

The camera got a bump as well. It’s now 8 megapixel and fairly decent at that. The sensitivity of the photo sites has gone up instead of down so we’re getting pictures with less noise for a given light level.

Overall

If I simply had an iPhone 4 I don’t know if it would be worth the upgrade. It’s cool and all… but it’s still just a really awesome phone. For me it would be a toss-up.

In my case however as I upgrade Ennie gets the older phone. This winds up being a two-fer upgrade since both of us move a generation forward. In this case I think it’s completely worthwhile.

I was looking at these since they came out a few days ago.

Why upgrade from the old MacBook Pro Late 2008? Is it even an upgrade?

Well, the biggest reason is the size and battery life of the new machine. It’s a compelling argument to have something as light as this computer that can honestly last more than 6 hours of real use. Even with the CPU cranked it’s been estimating around two and a half hours of run time.

The MBP was getting around three hours when it was idling.

That’s a huge difference!

The screen, while it’s 13″, is actually the same resolution as the 15″ MBP.

So I walked into the Apple store in Legacy Village and picked one up and brought it home.

So far it certainly seems like an upgrade from the MBP. I can’t complain about the performance of the i7 processor. I do wish it had more memory, but I’m figuring that with the flash storage a bit of swapping isn’t going to be completely deadly.

Speaking of the flash, I can attest that it’s fast. Launching applications has never been faster for me, even on the bit iMac upstairs.

So far I’m really happy with it. I’m surprised in a way how fast it is. Likewise I’m very surprised how good the audio sounds.

Here are the weights of the Mac laptops I have around:

• Mid 2011 MacBook Air: 2.95 lbs / 1.34 kg
• Late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro: 5.52 lbs / 2.51 kg
• Mid 2008 MacBook: 4.91 lbs / 2.23 kg

Last week I got another set of drives for my system — 1x 2TB drive to be hooked up to the computer and 2x 2TB drives to be my rotating backup drives.

(I do feel strange ordering up 6TB worth of drives from Amazon)

So the process goes something like this: move some big directories from the first two drives (1.5TB and 2TB) onto the new 2TB drive then start to back things up again. No problem right?

Well, on drive two (I have is labeled Backup1ExFw20A) it started to do some thrashing when backing things up.

Fragmentation? Let’s format it and try again. It’s a backup anyway and I have another backup already off-site so I don’t have any real issue with formatting my backup.

The rsync started off fine at aroung 20MB/s but within an hour it was back to thrashing the heads. I let it run overnight and when I woke up I saw it spontaneously unmount the drive mid-write.

Gaaahhh!

(I think the USB dock was the blame in this case since I had to power-cycle the USB-SATA dock to get it to recognize any drive)

I don’t like potentially corrupt backups so I started over.

It did the same thing again, though this time it took only a few hours to unmount.

When I reset the dock and remounted the drive I hit Command-Space to start up spotlight to start something up.

“Indexing BackupExFw20A…”

Ah-ha!

The thrashing was Spotlight trying to index the backup!

I turned it off for the backup drive and immediately things were quiet again.

I reformatted the backup one last time for good measure and turned off Spotlight for it (and the other two backup drives) and things have been smooth even since.

BTW – Here’s my backup script in case anyone is interested in doing something similar:

#! /bin/bash

if [ -d /Volumes/BackupExFw15A ]
then
    rsync -av --delete --exclude='/.Spotlight-V100' \
      --exclude='/.Trashes' --exclude='/.fseventsd' \
      --filter='P /.Spotlight-V100' --filter='P /.fseventsd' \
      --exclude='*~' /Volumes/ExFw15A/ \
      /Volumes/BackupExFw15A
elif [ -d /Volumes/BackupExFw20A ]
then
    rsync -av --delete --exclude='/.Spotlight-V100' \
      --exclude='/.Trashes' --exclude='/.fseventsd' \
      --filter='P /.Spotlight-V100' --filter='P /.fseventsd' \
      --exclude='*~' /Volumes/ExFw20A/ \
      /Volumes/BackupExFw20A
elif [ -d /Volumes/BackupExFw20B ]
then
    rsync -av --delete --exclude='/.Spotlight-V100' \
      --exclude='/.Trashes' --exclude='/.fseventsd' \
      --filter='P /.Spotlight-V100' --filter='P /.fseventsd' \
      --exclude='*~' /Volumes/ExFw20B/ \
      /Volumes/BackupExFw20B
else
    echo "No backup device found."
fi

I used to have different scripts per backup drive but I didn’t want to continue the pattern as I grew from two to three drives. Now all I have to do I slap in a drive and “sudo backup” and away we go!

As I posted on Friday, the hard drive on my iMac went to the bit bucket in the sky last week. That’s neither a fail or a win with the mac since it’s just a hard drive. In addition to storing data they up and die on you with some regularity.

So I dropped it off at the Apple store in Legacy Village on Friday night at 7. It was a completely non-confrontational transaction; they didn’t try to not take it back. They asked no questions and he told me that they had a drive in stock so it wouldn’t take long.

Yesterday I got a call at around 10:30 saying the computer was ready!

We’re talking 3 1/2 business hours to turn it around! (They close at 9 PM and open at 10 AM)

I’m completely and totally blown away by the service.

The one problem (which I was able to fix) is two or three pieces of dust and a tiny bit of schmutz. I realized how easy it is to take off the glass from an iMac and in no time the glass was spotless again. All I used to take it off was the suction cup mount from my Garmin Zumo.  

As a side note: the awesomest thing to use in this case is Sprayway Graphic Arts Cleaner. The stuff absolutely rocks! Not just for this but any glass surface. I’ve used it mainly in framing pictures… but mirrors and windows… and now iMac screens. I’ve never been let down!