This weekend I bought a copy of Bioshock.  A Microsoft only game.  This was fine as I thought all I would have to do is install Boot Camp.  When I got home I fired up the MacBook Pro and went to installing boot camp.  After burning the driver disc I was stuck waiting the the drive to be partitioned.  I went to grab a sandwich and came back to find that the partition had failed.  OSX said it couldn’t move some file and I would have to reformat the drive before I could partition it.  Looks like this isn’t going to be as easy as I thought I said, and went to get out my external hard drive and peruse a reformat.  After booting the OSX install disc I went to Disk Utility and made an image of my drive.  Then booted back into my system and mounted the image just to verify that all my data was there.  All the data was copied, so I reformatted the internal drive.  All well and good so far.  After the format I went to restore the drive from the image I had created, but to my surprise I was unable to do so.  After spending a few hours online trying to figure out how to restore the image Apple.com left me with two options.
One: install OSX on another external drive and boot from that, then restore the internal drive.
Two: boot my Mac into disk mode and connect it to another Mac and restore from the image.

Neither of these options where going to work for me, so I decided I would just mount the image and copy everything to the internal drive.  After that was finished I rebooted to find a black error screen.  This wasn’t what I had hoped for.  By this time my sandwich is long gone and its getting really late, so I say screw it I will just reinstall the OS and spend the next week getting things back to normal.  Off I go on another long operation when I find an option that will copy my old system to a folder and reuse my User folder.  About and hour later I was sitting at the Log In screen for my user account and everything was pretty much back to normal.   Unfortunately I was out of time and didn’t get a chance to try Boot Camp again.  But I would assume it will work.

What I Learned.
1.  I am going to need to find a better way to back up.
2. Through all the madness I somehow gained 5-10GB of extra data.
3.  Games are not always worth it.

So I have been using my little shuffle for a few months now waiting for today, the day Apple released the new IPods. Let me fist explain what I use my IPod for. I listen to podcasts everyday, some music, movies would only be on watched while waiting in line or something. I don’t think I need to carry my entire library with me, as I can’t have an IPod at work, and most listening I do is of podcasts. You may say, just stick with the shuffle, but I like to see what I am listening to, as well as being able to move about my files efficiently. Could you help me decide.

1. IPod Classic – Comes in 80gb ($249), 160gb ($349). I would be able to carry my entire library with me, but its like an old IPod. Although having 160gb would be nice for just backups and other files.
2. IPod Touch – Comes in 8gb ($299), 16gb ($399). Like an IPhone, but with only Wifi. I would only be able to carry podcast and some song. Probably hackable, but not sure right now.  Also as with the IPhone, its all touch. I don’t know if I like this for use in a car.
3. Iphone – Refurbished 8gb($349) It’s an IPhone, so its got bluetooth, wifi, and even the phone part if I wanted to get data for it. Also Its only $50 more than the 8gb Touch, and I know the IPhone will be hacked up and awesome.
4. Achos5 – Comes in 80gb ($329), 160gb ($379). It has wifi, touch screen, browser plugin, DVR function (I wouldn’t use) and some other stuff. Take a look and see what you think. Also the size on this seem large to me.

I am leaning toward the IPhone, just because it has more goodies for about the same price as the IPod Touch. Although if i remember correct, you need an adapter to use regular headphones on the IPhone. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Nathan

Mac Resource here in Huntsville is selling the Big Apple sign on the front of the building.  The auction is up on Ebay.  I think I am going to take some pictures of it, if its still up.

At the end of May Apple upgraded iTunes to version 7.2, which included DRM Free music. I was so excited about this that I upgraded right away. The next morning, I found myself yelling at the computer, seems as though Apple made it so that podcasts couldn’t be manually sorted on the 2nd generation Shuffle. Podcasts always move them selves to the top of the shuffle and sort by newest. This problem is irritating, but I figured someone probably already complained and Apple would fix it in the next release. Then a couple weeks ago Apple released a firmware upgrade to the 2nd generation Shuffle. What did that fix? Hell I don’t know, they didn’t release any information about it. The firmware upgrade didn’t fix the podcast problem. Then last week the new version of iTunes I had hoped would fix the manually sorting issues came out. But unfortunately it didn’t fix the problem either. I can now move podcasts around on the shuffle, but the manual sort doesn’t get saved to the shuffle. I have found many others that having the same issues, here are a few links to discussions about this problem.

• Why won’t 2G Shuffle retain manual sort order?
• Can keep everything but podcasts in proper order
• ipod shuffle 2g won’t sync podcasts although music syncs fine
• I can no longer move song around on my shuffle playlist

Yep thats right, looks like the iPhone won’t be able to use mp3′s as ringtones. Does anyone else find this rather crazy. You will have 4-8gigs of music, but you can’t use any of it a ringtone. I would figure that if the damn phone did one thing good, it would allow you to have any audio file as a ring tone. Engadget has a nice listing of shitty things about the iPhone. Enjoy!

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