Favourite Hour

Apple's first R&D center outside the US - in Israel

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:54:00 +0000

This looks more certain now. According to the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, Apple will open its first R&D center outside the US, in Israel. Heading the center will be Aharon Aharon, an Israeli entrepreneur, who is in Cupertino right now, preparing for the job.

Aharon will probably be a Senior VP for VLSI as well, according to the newspaper sources.

Here is the link to the original article (in Hebrew), though you can run it through your favorite translation web site.

Google Currents Review - iOS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:38:00 +0000

I was excited about Google Currents, especially about it's Google Reader support. I currently use Reeder and Early Edition 2, and I was sure Currents would replace them all.

What's the deal with Google Currents? Imagine my surprise when I saw this:

Apparently, you need to add your Google Reader feeds one by one! Unless I've missed something, this is the worst support of Google Reader that I have ever seen. I haven't even tried it to see if it actually supports syncing with Google Reader (i.e. if I read a story on Currents, will it disappear from Reader).

This is pretty bad... So long Google Currents...

Do a barrel roll

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:41:00 +0000

Try searching Google for:
Do a barrel roll

Pretty cool!

Do a barrel roll

iTunes Match is about to go live?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 19:48:00 +0000

The music settings in ios5 have a new iTunes match option.
Turning it on results in a message you need to enable it on iTunes on your computer (so much for a computer-less environment).

Can't wait to get home and check this out.

Update: The iTunes Match on the iTunes Store is still "Coming Soon". Hope that it's really soon.

Slow OS X Lion App Store - Solved!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:00:00 +0000

One of the biggest features of the new version of Lion - 10.7.2, the bug that caused the App Store to be extremely slow is now gone!

To anyone who hasn't witnessed it, the App Store was so slow, it was impossible to do anything with it. You'd open it up and see the beach ball for 10 seconds. You would click on a link, and again, the beach ball for a few seconds. It was virtually useless.

So if you haven't upgraded to 10.7.2 for the iCloud support, at least to it for this bug fix!

The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found. - on a Mac - Solved

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:18:00 +0000

Well, I thought that iPhone on a Mac would work without issues. Alas, that is not the case.

Yesterday, when trying to sync (wirelessly or wired), I got this annoying error: The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found.

It took me a couple of hours to find the solution on the web. I did find a few solutions, though they required tons of work (search for a problematic app and remove it, etc...).

The simple solution (OS X - Lion) is this - run Disk Utility, select your HD, and click Repair Disk Permissions.

It took half an hour, but solved this issue completely.

Do make sure to back up your machine regularly though. I have no idea if this could actually damage your data.

Airplay Mirroring on iOS 5 with iPad 2

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 22:02:00 +0000

This was one of the features that I was waiting most for - Airplay mirroring with iPad 2, using Apple TV. I wanted to use this feature for playing games on the TV, as well as FaceTime.

Here are the results so far:

Fifa 12 - wouldn't work at all - got stuck at the game loading screen.
Zombie Highway and Asphalt 6 - working, but with a lag. In Asphalt 6 I kept crashing, and ZH wasn't that good either.

FaceTime was OK, with a slight lag also.

I guess it would work nice for presentations and such, but for video games, it appears to slow.

What do you think?

Cannot Sync Notes to iCloud in iOS5

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:09:00 +0000

Among the few issues I had while upgrading to iOS 5, one of them was pretty annoying - my iPhone couldn't sync Notes to my iPad.

I'll start at the beginning. My iPhone 4 kept failing to install iOS 5, so I installed my iPad 2 first. When I set up my iCloud sync for Notes, I was prompted to create a .me email account to be used for syncing. I did so, and it looked like it was working. When I opened Notes, I had an Accounts button, and there I could choose iCloud. Also, in Settings -> Notes, I could choose iCloud as the Default Account.

Later I successfully upgraded my iPhone, and set it to sync notes, but when I went into Notes, I noticed that there was no iCloud option. Furthermore, on my iPad, if I'd go to Settings -> iCloud -> Account, I would see an Advanced section at the bottom, with my .me account, but it was missing from the iPhone.

What I did to solve this was on the iPhone, go to Settings -> iCloud, and click Delete Account (make sure you have everything backed up!!!), reboot the iPhone, and set iCloud again. This time everything worked great, and I got the .me account added to my iCloud settings.

Air Display for iOS / Mac Review

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 19:44:00 +0000

Air Display allows you to extend your desktop to an iPad / iPhone. As simple as that. You only have to be on the same network for it to work.

You can either mirror what you see on your main display (but you would have to lower your resolution to that of the iPad), or have your iDevice act as a secondary screen.

Some useful examples. If you want to show a web page or document to someone outside your office, you can simply drag the window to your iDevice, and take the window with you (make sure to disable the screen saver first!).
If you want to see Flash enabled sites on your iPad, this is also possible, through this screen sharing.

You cannot type in the secondary screen, unless you have an on screen keyboard there as well. However, you can click, right-click, and scroll.

One important thing, which I was not aware of. As it is an extension of your desktop, when you switch desktops on your Mac, you also switch the desktop on the secondary screen (iDevice). This means that if you want to use Air Display to constantly show the same thing while you continue to work on your Mac and switch desktops, it won't work.

Anyway, I highly recommend this to anyone needing a second screen, and that already has an iPad. It works pretty fast (at least on my setup)!

iTunes link

The official Blogger app for iOS is here!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:09:00 +0000

Well, this does come out after I needed a good Blogger app, but at least it is out!

Blogger on iTunes

Overall it looks great and syncs with the web version. As I'm writing this post I see this post as a draft on my Blogger app.

The post interface itself has all that you need. Location services, inserting images from your Camera Roll, or new pictures just taken.

I don't see an option to format your text though.

Anyway, it's about time!

Cannot sync photos to iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:48:00 +0000

I ran into this problem which drove me crazy these last couple of days.

When I tried to sync photos to my iPhone or iPad, I would get this message:

Some of your photos, including the photo Photo.JPG were not copied to the iPhone because they cannot be displayed on your iPhone

At first I thought the problem was with specific photos, but then I saw that event photos that synced once do not sync now.

I have searched the web a while before I found the answer, which seems specific to Vista and Windows 7.

The main solution is to run iTunes as Administrator, and then the sync would work! You may need to delete the "iPod Photo Cache" folder which is in your photos sync folder before it would work, but in my case simply deleting it didn't help, and I needed to run as Administrator as well.

Hope this post saves you some time.

Apple TV 2 – Philips and Sony TV Owners - Colors Change to Green and Pink

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 12:25:00 +0000

I recently got an Apple TV 2 (ATV2). Overall, a product with great potential, and I promise to review all the positive aspects, once the following huge bug will be resolved.

It appears that if you own certain Sony or Philips (mine is Philips 9664) TVs, you may get a very frustrating experience. After 20 or 30 minutes of watching, the colors get warped, and change into green and pink. This is regardless of what you are watching (e.g. SD or HD content, pictures, or just the menu of the ATV2). The only way to fix it is to switch to another input (e.g. switch to your DVD), and then switch back to the ATV2.

There is a huge topic about it in the official Apple support forum (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2600405&tstart=0), with over 600 replies and over 100,000 views! Unfortunately there is no official Apple response so far, and the latest software update hasn't solved it. According to people on this thread, Apple either claims that they are working on the problem, or that this is a problem with the TV manufacturer. As I don't see either Sony or Philips doing anything about it, if Apple doesn't solve this, these are $99 that were thrown down the drain.

Apparently the problem is with how the HDMI handshake between ATV2 and the TV is performed, so you can see why each manufacturer would say that the problem is with the other manufacturer, but I assume that it would be easier for Apple to solve this, or at least put a disclaimer that this product doesn't work correctly with the following TVs.

There is another problem, which I'm sure is connected to the first one. From time to time, when I try to play HD content, I get this message:

This content requires HDCP for playback. HDCP isn't supported by your HDMI connection.

Now, the same content can play without a problem some times, and other times it would display this message, so I assume it has to do with the HDMI implementation.

Overall, this is a big disappointment. I was looking at several streamers, and chose Apple TV 2 despite its shortcoming compared to other streamers. I did so because of the very good experience I have with iPhone 4 and iPad, and I wanted something that would be as painless to operate as these two. Obviously Apple has messed up on this, and I hope they have a solution soon.

Update long overdue: it is finally working correctly!

Nokia

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 06:58:00 +0000

What phone is this? How did I take this photo?

Blogger app for iOS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 06:56:00 +0000

Anyone know of a good app for Blogger for the iOS devices?
A quick search didn't find anything significant.
I need something that can also include pictures.

Windows 7 - IE Very Slow - 100% CPU

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:06:00 +0000

I have recently encountered this issue: Internet Explorer on Windows 7 - when opening IE it takes a long time for your home page to appear. If you open a new tab, it also takes a lot of time, and the CPU is at 100%.

Checking the Task Manager, I have noticed the problem is with this process: ssvagent.exe

This process is a part of the Java Run-Time, which I have just installed. After some searching on the internet, I have found a workaround:

1) Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs
2) Click on Manage add-ons
3) Select the Java Plug-In and disable it

For me it both solved the 100% CPU, and the Java application that I needed still worked.

Thanks for http://www.byteblocks.com/post/2009/08/20/JRE-makes-IE-run-slow-on-Windows-7.aspx for the workaround.

10 Google Wave Invites to Give Away

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:58:00 +0000

I have 10 Google Wave invites to give away. Just comment below with your first Name, State/Country, why you need the invite (just so that I know who I'm sending the invite to, it's not much to ask, is it?), and email address. First 10 who comment with these details will get the invites.

Second Thoughts About Mozy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:40:00 +0000

After being so happy about Mozy, I've noticed that the Mozy Restore process on the MozyHome client was not working OK. The Restore window just closed without restoring any files. I've been on email with their support, but I tried searching for "Mozy Restore" on Google, and found a lot of complaints. I've narrowed it down to results just from this year, and still got quite a few stories of people who had a total meltdown of their system, and then found out that the Web Restore files takes forever to download, if they are downloaded at all. Some people had to resort to the DVD option, where they paid 100$ to get DVDs from Mozy, and some complained that not all of their stuff was on it.
So, I'm now thinking of abandoning Mozy. Instead, I may purchase a second external HD, and do alternating backups, keeping at least one HD offsite (perhaps even both).

Update 1: No word from Mozy support for the last 12 hours. Anyway, I’ve decided to remove Mozy. There goes my $5.

No more online backup solutions in the near future.

Online Backups Solutions – And The Winner Is…

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Update: I have decided to remove Mozy.

Data. That’s an important part of our life for some time now. Documents, photos, music, you name it! For me, the data I would most like to protect is comprised of family photos I’ve been taking with digital cameras for the last 6 years (about 80GB of data). I also have ripped CDs, and I’m not sure the actual CDs have 100% survived (I have at least one CD which is almost not playable anymore).

In the past years, I have used CDs, and later DVDs to back up my files. The process was long, and as I know personally, a CD may not last very long. I once had a CD which was dead after only one year.

Today I use external hard drives to back up my data. I use a 500GB LaCie hard disk, and the backup software that came with it. They work pretty well. I back up about once a month, and keep the hard disk at work, to minimize risks.

This is not enough for me. I was looking for another solution, an online one, which is becoming more popular these days (the Cloud, you know…). I’ve played a little bit with DropBox, but it’s mainly for synchronizing files between computers, and not for backing up your files. As it only uploads files that reside in its own folder, it is not a good backup solution.

So yesterday I decided it was time to check the field of online backups.

Warning: if you just want to read the bottom line, and not what my tired mind has instructed my poor hands to write, scroll down to the bold, large font heading way down below.

I’ve read over several hours reviews of various services. To name a few: JungleDisk, Carbonite, Mozy, iDrive, Live Mesh, and Backblaze. I’ve read a lot of different opinions, and came down with three finalists: Carbonite, Backblaze, and Mozy. It was late, so I don’t remember why I ruled out Carbonite, but I also placed Mozy in second place because I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t find a lot of information on their web site (something which is not true, as I found out later… much later…).

So, at 12:24am, I had Backblaze installed (15 day trial – not limited to data amount). I wasn’t happy. Backblaze did not let me choose what I wanted to back up. Supposedly, you only choose which drives you want to back up, and Backblaze backs up only data files on these drives. However, looking at the list of files it was backing up, I saw it backed up meaningless junk, and that junk came at a price of 160GB of data.

I went to sleep.

Around 3:00am I woke up. I wasn’t happy with my choice. I had a lot of questions on my mind. 3:49am, I knew I couldn’t fall asleep, so I got up to check how Backblaze was doing. It was still backing up, 40 days to complete. I’ve checked the second runner, Mozy, again. This time I found lots of information in the Mozy support site, and understood how powerful, Mozy’s solution is.

I’ve checked Backblaze again. In 4 hours of work, it backed up 460MB of data (around 155MB an hour). I’ve uninstalled it, and installed Mozy instead.

Mozy provides a free 2GB account. I’ve selected around 1.2GB of files and went to sleep at 5am.

Woke up at 6:45am. Tired.

At 12:00pm I checked my account on the Mozy site. The backup was complete. 1.2GB at 7 hours – around 170MB an hour. Not too bad.

Tonight I purchased a monthly unlimited subscription ($4.95) for Mozy, and set up an 87GB backup (I’m currently not backing up audio, only focusing on photos and documents).

So, why did I choose Mozy?

It has advanced features. You can select a preset backup set (e.g. “Word processing documents”), select specific files or folders, or create backup sets of your own using rules (e.g. all of the doc files in a specific folder).
Backup open files (Backblaze doesn’t do this).
No size limit on individual files (Backblaze has a 4GB limit).
3 ways to restore files: Web (that’s the only way Backblaze does it), the Mozy client, or using Windows Explorer.
You can also add files to the Mozy backup directly from Windows Explorer.
Let’s say you trashed a file (e.g. drew a mustache on a picture of your child by mistake) and it got backed up. You can still restore to an earlier version. I’m still checking this one though. I tried restoring a previous version using the client, and it just closed. I was able to do this with the Web restore. I’m also not sure how long and how many previous versions are kept. Deleted files are kept for 30 days, perhaps the same with different versions, I’m still waiting for the Mozy support with this one. Got a quick response from Mozy:
”We don't have any issue with the "Client restore" restoring previous versions. We keep the deleted data for 30days, and we keep 30days of file versioning.”
They offered a solution which I will try later.
When switching to a new computer, you can install Mozy on the new computer, and you will have 30 days to download your files. With Backblaze, you first need to download the files. If you install it on a new computer, your old files are lost.
Probably more reasons, I’m getting tired now…

2 important notes for conclusion:

Whichever online backup solution you choose, note that it’s a backup, not archive solution. If you delete a file from your computer, it will be deleted from the online backup. Mozy lets you restore your deleted files for 30 days.
I don’t believe it replaces the need for a backup on an external disk. I still plan to back up my data every month on my external disk. Restoring files from an external disk is much easier, and I’m keeping all of the versions as well. I don’t delete anything.

That’s all for now.

Samsung P2350

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:42:00 +0000

Got a new LCD monitor, the Samsung SyncMaster P2350. What a magnificent screen!

First of all, to work with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 is simply great. The amount of space you have makes it really easy to place multiple application in such a way that they are always visible. For example, you can have your browser, IM, Gadgets visible together.

Second, the screen is just great in all other aspects, such as color, sharpness, etc. It’s just great to look at!

Now, playing games on this is something else. Unfortunately, I can’t play Crysis Warhead in full resolution because the FPS is too low, but even with a lower resolution, with the screen size, and it being wide, it's a whole new level of experience.

I still need to check it out with FSX. It should be equally great.

Also checked out some HD video (only 720p) which looked great. I need to get a sample of Full HD content (I hope my machine can handle it).

Where am I?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:31:00 +0000

No, the blog isn’t dead. I’ve been lucky enough to be busy with a lot of things. To name a few, iPod Touch, which is simply a great piece of device. A minor thing called work has also kept me busy.

BTW, got an invite to Wave. Sorry, haven’t received invites to share. Nothing to talk about though. The few friends that I have there don’t seem to be using it much themselves.

Google Wave Invite Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 04:45:00 +0000

I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to get an invite (insert sad face here). However, there is still hope, as the lucky ones get a chance to invite 8 people! What do they do with such invites? Some probably invite their friends, others share them freely within their online community (e.g. Lifehacker).

Oh, and others sell them on ebay! That’s right, currently I see 7 people selling on ebay, with prices reaching up to $100. That’s really not so nice…

So anyway, if you have an invite to send me, I would be happy to receive one at this address:

And if you want to receive an invite, feel free to comment, and hopefully someone nice will come along and share their invite.

BTW, this brings back memories of the Gmail invites. I got mine in return for a postcard (actually 2 postcards, as 2 people sent me an invite).

Picasa 3.5 People Name Tagging

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:48:00 +0000

One of the most cool features of Picasa 3.5 is the name tagging feature. What Picasa does is go through all of your pictures, identify faces, tries to group them into similar faces, and lets you name the faces, so that later you can find pictures of specific people easily. As this is something that I used to do manually, using the labels, it is going to save me a lot of time in the future.

I’ve been playing with Picasa 3.5 for a couple of days now, and I’m very impressed with how easy it is to find and tag a large number of faces. I already have 4000 labeled pictures of my son, 3000 of my daughter, and a few thousand of various relatives.

The way it works is very nice. You start identifying people. As you identify more pictures for a certain person, Picasa “learns” this and suggests more pictures of the same person. So, for example, if I identified 300 pictures of my son, I already had 800 suggestions for other pictures of my son. You still have to go through these suggestions manually, as there are misses, but this is done very quickly.

Even today, after I think that most pictures of my son and daughter were identified, when I go through the Unnamed list (of 18,000 faces!), I sometimes find pictures of them, identify them, and afterwards Picasa suggests more pictures of them.

So currently I still have to go through 18,000 faces, to ignore the ones that I don’t care to tag. There are were funny moments too, where I have found faces of statues, a drawing on a shirt, people from scanned DVD covers, a sphinx, and so on. This part is going to take some time to complete. There is no quick way to do this, and the pictures are not grouped in high numbers (usually 2 pictures per thumbnail).

There are other new features too, such as integrated geo-tagging, and Adjust Date and Time, which I believe is new, but so far, People Tagging is the best reason, at least for me, to upgrade to the new version.

Internet Explorer Market Share Decline

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:45:00 +0000

While checking my humble blog’s statistics, it was very interesting to see how Microsoft IE’s market share declined over the last few months.

At the beginning of the year, the IE visits on my site were at about 50%. Let’s take June for example.

July showed a rather huge decline of about 10%, which went mostly to Firefox.

August had an interesting results – an exact tie (what are the chances of that!).

And now we are in September, and although the month isn’t over yet, I wanted to check the status of this contest. As you can see, currently Firefox has taken the lead. However, Firefox has taken only some of the IE market share, and the other browsers have enjoyed this decline as well.

I know this isn’t an exact science. I don’t have too many visitors, and the sample data in each month is different (luckily I get more visitors these last few months), but still it is saying something.

WeGame - Beware of Spam

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:43:00 +0000

Just got a message from wegame.com saying "itai sent you a photo. Want to see the photo?"
As much as I love photos, it seemed to be a little suspicious, so I've searched "wegame" on the web and found some interesting stuff. First of all, if you just search for "wegame" you get their official site, and a few other, safe looking sites. However, if you search for "wegame spam" you get a few more interesting sites. I have not investigated this very thoroughly, but as far as I understand, in order to see the photo you need to sign up, and as part of this process, you may end up emailing everyone on your address book that you have sent them a photo. I don't know how it's done. Perhaps you give them your user name and password for your email, or they may do this in another way.

The main point is that if you get an email from wegame.com, don't click on any link, even if it's from someone you know.

If I'm completely wrong, please let me know.

Cannot Access Amazon Due To Anti-virus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 04:04:00 +0000

For the last two days, I cannot access amazon.com due to this warning:

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 for Windows Workstations claims that the site is infected with “HEUR:Trojan.Script.Generic”.

That’s annoying.