The MacDocs Blog

First, the ‘What’:

For the sake of really being able to talk about the iPad, I decided to write this entire blog entry on the iPad.  I’m hoping the typing get’s easier.  To be honest, it is awkward at first.  Especially if your hands are like mine and resemble those of a medium-sized ape.   The optional keyboard accessory should make this a moot point, but if a few of the iPad’s selling features are portability and convenience, then typing on the iPad should at least be tolerable.  I’ll let you know if it get’s easier as we go along.

The first thing that impressed me about the iPad was its speed.  Apple’s new A4 processor seems to be doing its job very well. Navigating around the iPad is a breeze.   Running apps, browsing the Internet, and watching movies are all fast and easy.  In fact, Netflix ran faster on the iPad than any other device on which I’ve previously used it.  It looks just as pretty too.  From watching movies, playing games, and creating Keynote presentations, everything I’ve done on the iPad looks beautiful.  The Netbook and Kindle just became obsolete.

Being able to connect the iPad to a projector or TV makes it a great presentation tool for Keynote, movies, or photo slideshows.  The iPad will be great for travel too.  While some may find the size of the iPad a bit awkward, if it had been any bigger or smaller, it would have defeated its purpose.  It’s the perfect travel size laptop/iPhone in-betweener (not a word but it works).

And if all that isn’t enough for you, there is the feeling it gives you that you’re a crew member on the Starship Enterprise.  If you’re reading this Mr. Jobs I’m still saving up for the iTransporter.  Fingers crossed.

The iPad isn’t perfect, but if the simplified OS and lack of a built-in camera are deal-breakers for you, then send an angry email and wait for the next version of iPad. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.  Which brings us to the next question:

Why?:

The question many of you may be asking yourselves is ” Why do I need an iPad?”.  The short answer is, you don’t.  The fact is, if you approached technology purely from a “need” standpoint your most advanced piece of technology would be a horse-drawn plow.  The “need” of technology comes when we take a luxury and mold parts of our everyday lives around it until we can’t imagine doing a related task without it.

The iPad has endless “need” potential.  No matter what your interests may be, from sports to scrap booking, to knowing what you missed when you walked out of a movie to go to the bathroom; there’s an app for it.

Someone out there, somewhere, is going to create an app that makes something you do or love that much easier and convenient. Embracing that idea could lead to a whole new realm of technological splendor.  If it isn’t there now, it soon will be.  Until you pick up an iPad and take one for a test drive, you may not even know why you really want one.

The iPad has its place in everyone’s life. Whether or not you allow it to fill that space is up to you, but I’m confident if you do, you’ll soon see just how much you really “needed” an iPad.

P.S. This may be revealing too much about myself, but if you do get an iPad, fight the temptation to just use it to play countless hours of Diner Dash and Plants vs Zombies.  It’s hard to still like yourself at 3:00 in the morning when you realize how much time you just wasted and can never get back.  On a positive note however, if you do get caught in that trap the iPad’s battery life will be more than sufficient. And for those late night term paper write ups, the typing DOES get easier.

written by Luke

The year 2001 was interesting to say the least. Beside the devastating experience we shared in the national collective we had a MacDocs disaster. The shop we occupied was burned down as a result of some questionable activity in an adjoining office space. The pain of rebirth landed us in our current space for the last decade.

One of the first things we noticed is that people started abandoning computers and related equipment. At that point in time I made a quick phone call to the city landfill the conversation went something like this.

“Hi I run a computer shop and I have a question.”

“Ok, what can I do for you?” replied the sing song female voice at the other end.

“We are receiving items in our shop that people are wanting to get rid of, and we need to know how to properly dispose of such items.”

“Do you have a dumpster?” She asked.

“Well, we do but I know there are all sorts of nasty things in computers. Components and the like I would rather not just toss in the garbage.” I protested.

“Currently we don’t have a proper method to dispose of that type of refuse.”

Now what? Well it took a few years, but we finally found a company who “disposed” of these items properly. The down side of this new proper disposal was that it would cost us significantly more than simply lofting things in to the dumpster. But we felt it was well worth the additional cost to “do the right thing.”

The recycle company charges us by weight. To that end we have devised a basic charge for certain types of equipment that we accept for recycling. Using this method it is pretty much a break even proposition for us. We will recycle a “like for like” computer for free when some one purchases a new computer.

We have a storage area within our shop that fills up over time and about every three months or so we call for a pickup. The truck pulls up, the driver loads all the stuff, gives us a receipt and drives away. But where does it go from there?

A couple of weeks ago I had a chance to visit the facility and chat with the manager about exactly how and what they do. I had initially asked if they would allow me to bring a video camera and do a video blog. I was really excited to video the huge jaws munching and crunching hard drives and data storage devices. But alas, they turned down my request for taping siting privacy and corporate trade secrets. I did the next best thing. I searched the internet for the video and found a different company who had posted what I saw, here it is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elvCSIkCZHc. I would like to see some one try to reconstruct data from that beast.

Here is some of what I learned. Since my initial chat with the folks at the landfill the rules and laws regarding the disposal of computer equipment have changed. In fact if you are caught tossing such things, specifically as a business you could be fined. Lucky for us we are several years ahead of the curve. But for everyone else it is something to keep in mind.

Much of the actual disassembly of the electronic equipment is accomplished by hand. With screw drivers, hammers and a slew of other tools the computers and such are stripped to unique components and physically separated into bins.

The bins are then rolled to different areas of the warehouse to be dealt with more appropriately. For example, all the hard drives, CD-DVD’s, yes and even a few old floppies, Zips etc, get rolled over to the jaws of death, remember the video?

There are some things that are worth a small amount of money. There are a variety of precious metals that can be taken out and returned to their component state to be reused elsewhere. When I was a younger man I really didn’t get it. Shouldn’t a recycler be paying me to take my junk? The reality is that it is so costly to get the valuable stuff out that it would be a negative business venture if they paid for the old stuff.

The plastics caught my eye as we wandered from area to area. The “Apple” stuff is pretty easy to see, especially the bright colors from the late nineties and early two thousands. The odd thing about “Apple” plastics, I was told, is that they are different than others. Apparently they are more difficult to break down because they are “tougher” than other stuff so they are bundled by themselves when enough has been gathered.

The overwhelming majority of bundles then end up in rail cars to be sent all over the US. California kept coming up as one location that many things are sent for further “deconstruction.”

It’s nice to know that this stuff won’t simply end up in a land fill some where. It’s one of those things we do to make certain we are part of a bigger solution rather than making an existing problem worse.

As I left the warehouse and went through the office waiting area I noticed a little computer with a nine inch screen. I was taken back in time some twenty years to the days of the MacPlus.

“Why are you hanging on to that little animal?” I asked.

“Because some day it will be a collector’s item.” He answered.

I smiled thinking of transparent aluminum.

written by Russ

I recently had the opportunity to do some research on a subject that causes me to lose sleep at night: Data Breach. Now most of you are probably thinking, “Data Breach doesn’t apply to me. I’m on a Mac. Viruses and malware in general are something that the other half has to deal with.”, and I would have to agree. Data Breach, as most of us define it, conjures up scary images of some greasy-haired high school kid, sitting in his parents’ basement surrounded by 15 flat screen monitors with something that looks like “Matrix code” streaming on each of them (anyone seen “Hackers”? No? Maybe “Swordfish”? No? Huh…). That’s not the kind of Data Breach I’m talking about. According to a study by the Ponemon Institute in 2007, malicious “hacking” behavior is only responsible for about 18% of Data Breach. The two main contributors to Data Breach: Data Theft and Data Loss.

How many of you have confidential client information stored on your laptop or employ someone who does? And further, how much of this confidential information is protected inside a secure disk image or in some password-protected way? Now here’s the kicker, what if that laptop was stolen? First, do you have any way of retrieving the lost client data? Second, how would your clients feel knowing that their information is now in untrusted hands? So how do we prevent this type of data theft? Before you go handcuffing your laptops to your wrists, let me suggest a more effective, less awkwardly intrusive way to accomplish the same thing. Stop storing client data on your insecure laptops, flash drives, and mobile devices! Instead, use laptops and other mobile devices to access the client data on a secured server over a secured network. This way, you mitigate the risk of client data loss should your laptop fall into nefarious hands.

How many of you have backup sets or archives of client data? How many of those backups occur daily? Hourly? What would happen to your client data if there was a fire in your building and everything was destroyed? How long would it take you to rebuild the lost client data and how much money will it cost you? Recovering data from a damaged hard drive can cost up to $8,500! The solution to this type of data breach is simple: Offsite data backup with backup sets rotated weekly. This way, if there were a catastrophe, you would be no further than a week away from your most crucial data. In most cases, having an offsite data backup of this sort can literally keep you in business.

I found a couple of articles online (I’ll include links at the end) that talk about the cost of Data Breach, and the numbers were, although not surprising, quite staggering. It is estimated by one of the articles that the average cost of data breach is $200 per client! Now, while I realize that the articles focus on the larger “enterprise” type companies, the numbers still support the fact that data breach of any kind is extremely detrimental to any size company. So how can MacDocs help? MacDocs has the most experienced team of Apple Certified Server Administrators and Technical Coordinators in our Professional Service department. Our services have helped prevent data theft by installing and configuring servers and networks with security protocols that have kept client information safe and out of the hands of thieves (both the physical and digital kinds). We also help prevent data loss by offering weekly offsite backups. These solutions ensure that you are doing everything to prevent data breach and to keep your clients, your clients.

The Cost Of Data Loss Rises — Data Loss — InformationWeek

Data breach costs top $200 per customer record

written by Bryan

It never seems to fail. When you think everything is perfect a curve ball comes in high and fast.

A few weeks ago I had a small problem with our home computer. Ok, it really wasn’t a problem at first, but through my messing around it became a problem. Let’s just leave it at the idea that all the data on our iMac hard drive had been erased. Keep in mind this is the computer that holds each of my children’s accounts with music, photos etc. But more importantly my wife’s data, music photos etc. And I had a few things too.

Several months ago I had taken my own advice and installed a brand spankin’ new two terabyte Time Capsule. It has been faithfully backing up my son’s MacBook, My MacBook Pro, two Mac mini’s (One is a media center device, but that’s another story) and of course the iMac. All the data was erased? No problem I have Time Machine and a Time Capsule.

The story goes like this. I had a fresh install of Snow Leopard and proceeded with the setup assistant. I really loved when it asked if I wanted to transfer data from a Time Machine back up. All plugged in to the household ethernet network I emphatically clicked yes.

I’m no dummy, most of the time, so when the computer reported back it would take some where north of ten hours to complete the data transfer I took it in stride. After all, it was almost five hundred gigabytes of data traveling over a home gigabit network. At that point I went and found something else to occupy my time, still coming back every half hour or see to check the progress.

Imagine my surprise when after two hours it said, all done. I realize in retrospect I should have realized this was one of those “things that make you go, hmmm” moments. Or even when I tried to log in to my account and it kept bleeping that my password was incorrect. But nope I thought everything was hunky dory.

My two younger sons accounts logged right in and everything looked good. Of course neither of them have the huge iTunes library of their teenage siblings. The older kids gave the same bleep of dismay at the attempt to login as mine did. But thankfully the wife got right in, major catastrophe averted, except her desktop photo was gone…. And half of the applications from her dock were missing.

Weird, but not the end of the world. Through the spouse account I accessed the migration assistant and once again began the process. But this time I selected to only migrate the applications. After a couple of hours, it actually reported a fairly accurate time, I rebooted and voila all her programs were back.

I figured some where in the transfer it had simply scrambled a few of the passwords. I grabbed the installer disk and went through the steps to reset my password, which went off with out a hitch. That is until I rebooted, logged in to my account and found a blank new account with all my data gone. Logged in to one of the older kid’s account with the same result, no data.

Don’t panic, deep breaths. Logged in to my wife’s account, she is an administrator, and deleted my blank account, plus the others that had come up as blank. At that point I was able go back to the utility folder and use the trusty Migration assistant. With fingers crossed I selected only the accounts, that I had just deleted, from the Time Capsule and clicked migrate. Another few hours was the guesstimate. I was done messing with it. It was late. I went to bed.

The next fine morning before buzzing off to work I checked if my account had been resurrected. To my complete joy it was there. Login successful all the data in tact, deep sigh of relief. Dragged kids out of bed to make certain their’s were also whole then exhaled for what seemed the first time in the last day.

Sitting later at my desk I was pretty proud of myself. Even though I had created a near life ending situation, my life that is, I saved the day and looked like a hero. Then, the phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi honey. I think I have a problem.”

My heart sank.

“All of my photos are gone.”

Photos the joy and bane of my existence. Hadn’t I done this once before to her?

“And my email looks funny. I think some of it is missing, and I can’t download anymore mail.”

Ok. I rolled the dice with my own account and the kids accounts, time to hit a seven. I told her not to panic. I should know that is usually not the right thing to say, beside I was panicking enough for both of us. I walked her through logging in to my account and (gulp) deleting her account.

“Are you kidding? Delete my account?”

“Hey trust me. I’m a professional.”

Once again the process was started off using the migration assistant and migrating only her account. I did tell her if she had done anything in the last half day it was lost. Thankfully that wasn’t too big a problem. If all her photos were gone? Well that would be a problem.

She let me know the system reported her account would take an hour or two to transfer. Not too surprising since her’s was the largest account before. Nervously I told her I had to actually accomplish some other “work” and it wouldn’t really help for us to be on the phone for the next several hours, but instead to call me back when it had completed. I hung up and waited.

Now from the opening paragraph you might think this story has an unpleasant and ugly ending. I am still actually alive to tell the tale, which should tell you otherwise. In fact in turned out great. I know the Apple technology didn’t behave exactly the way it should have, and I spent a little more time than intended, but still it did work, I kept everything and more important I still have a happy home.

The moral of the story. No matter what, have a back up. That way if you do something dumb things can still turn out alright.

written by Russ

written by Russ

written by Russ

written by Russ

written by Russ

System 10 made dealing with fonts a heck of lot easier than they were in System 9 and it’s predecessors. I still remember in the days of 6 messing with the Font/DA Mover application, and even that was an improvement from what came before. Then System 7 and the Font Folder made a huge leap forward. But still it seems fonts are always managing to be the bane of someone’s existence, and with what I do it frequently ends up being mine.

Case in point. For a while my wife has had a strange problem with Safari. You know how it is, you usually don’t help the people closest to you until it becomes your problem. I had to sit down at the home computer and do a quick internet search. The computer was logged in to my wife’s account so I launched Safari and began the surf. Problem, the fonts were all skiwampas. The font on almost all the pages was some whacky font I didn’t recognize. I asked what she had done. The innocent answer was the one I hear all day, “Nothing honey.” Except most people don’t call me honey at work.

I tried logging in to other accounts on the computer and sure enough, whatever was going on was not system wide but limited to her account.

I went into the Safari preferences and tried to change the appearance font, size, width, appearance, nothing, nada, zilch. What on earth could this be?

I had all but given up, after all, it wasn’t my account ; - ) Then my wife launched her Mail and opened an email. Holy Crap. The email was exhibiting the same goofy font. So now I knew it was an account wide problem, not just Safari.

Bingo! It was some odd font conflict. Then with a little nudge we discussed that she had become something of a font junkie. With doing the “scrap book” thing she had found and, I hate to admit it, with my help been loading lots of “cutesy” fonts from scrap book and craft sites.

The Font Book program has become very useful. When I opened the application it showed the large number of fonts and a significant number of them with yellow warning icons. It didn’t take long to find the offending font. In our case it was a rogue copy of “Arial.” All it took was to disable, and finally delete the little rascal and now all is well.

At least I don’t have to sleep on the couch.

written by Russ

Now that Snow Leopard, aka 10.6, has been out a week or two, I thought I would find out what the guys around the shop think about it.

We haven’t seen as much of the grief as we have read about on the internet with printer driver problems, but we know there have been a few. Feel free to chime in with your experience.

Anyway, here is what everyone had to say. Warning; I make no guarantee of employee spelling, caps or anything else contained in their responses.

Now that Snow Leopard is out What do you think?

Bryan: It’s fast, most of the time. It freezes up on me quite a bit (fewer freezes after the 10.6.1 update, but still random spinning beachball moments that I could do without).  I like the changes made to the stacks in that now when I select a folder in the stack, it shows me the info within the stack in another stack rather than opening the folder in the finder

Dave: It is better than Leopard for sure.

Jayme: It’s grrrrrrrreat! Better than running Windows 7 any day.

Christian: 10.6 is great! Their are visible performance increases on my iMac core 2. I have found that 10.6 greatly enhances the performance of Logic 9. I can only assume that all of the new pro app versions can take advantage of 10.6.

Bryce: t’s really nice. The upgrade process was easy, and I do not have any issues. Everything is running better then before.

Scott: PRETTY PICTURE ON THE BOX BUT I HAVE NOT USED IT.

Is it worth the price?

Chris: Yes it is, for only $29 you can upgrade to the most advanced operating system in the world.

Bryan: Definitely!

Dave: It is only $29 for crying out loud. No Intel computer should be without it.

Jayme: Yes

Christian: Well worth the price!

Bryce: Definitely worth the price.

Scott: YES.

Was it worth the wait?

Chris: Yes, the improvements they made increase performance with little to no problems for the consumer.

Bryan: Not sure, what wait?

Dave: Yes but we would all have wanted it sooner I think.

Jayme: Really wasn’t waiting for it.

Christian: Sure. Like anyone I would have loved to of had sooner.

Bryce: Yes, definitely worth the wait.

Scott: ALWAYS LATE BUT WORTH THE WAIT.

Have you upgraded? And if not Why?

Chris: I have.

Bryan: Yes.

Dave: Yes.

Jayme: Yes, both work MacBook and home Mac Pro.

Christian: Yes, the day it came out.

Bryce: Yes, the day it came out.

Scott: NO. DOES NOT WORK WITH MY STAR TREK LCARS SCREEN SAVER.

What is your favorite, part, feature, thing, that 10.6 gives you or a client?

Chris: Activating multitouch for all laptops, and the new exposé features.

Bryan: Better calendars through 10.6 serve

Dave: I like the subtle fixes. Like an error that means something when you cannot eject an external drive. Also the stack scrolling has been useful. Things just seem to work better with less slow down.

Jayme: More 64-bit incorporation, as I own a Mac Pro that can run up to 32 gb of memory, I like knowing that Snow Leopard will allow apps. to access all of that memory.

Christian: Its workflow with Logic Studio. I assume that is related to Grand central dispatch. Maybe open GL contributes to that as well.

Bryce: Speed, speed, and more speed.

Scott: UNKNOWN. ALTHOUGH I’M REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO TRYING MY HAND AT WRITING CHINESE CHARACTERS DIRECTLY FROM THE MULTI-TOUCH TRACKPAD.

Where do Snow Leopards live?

Chris: Tibet.

Bryan: Snowleoppiton… I think it’s in Alaska… or Canada… one of those places that no ones really ever seen.

Dave: In the snow.

Jayme: Places where it snows?

Christian: Asia??

Bryce: No response.

Scott: FIRST GUESS: SIBERIA

SECOND GUESS: JUST OUTSIDE OF KANAB

written by Russ