I have an app here on my Mac called Yojimbo, which is a repsoitory for various bits ‘n’ bobs. I use it a lot for things like licence keys of purchased software, PDFs of online receipts, etc. But it also stores all the username and password combinations I use. If ever I find myself looking blankly at a login page, I just consult Yojimbo and find the relevant username and password, having first unlocked it with a password I keep in my brain.

Mac OS X has a utility that addresses this need and more, called Keychain. Whenever you visit a site and enter a username and password, you get the option to save for future use. This is handy if you only ever have one user, but if you have two or more users, it doesn’t work so well. My wife and I both have Gmail accounts (I have at least four), so relying on Keychain doesn’t work so well in this case. Keychain also keeps a record of usernames and passwords for system functions like wireless networks, etc.

I have another utility installed called 1Password, which gets over this. This installs a button on your browsers, which when you click it, lists all the user accounts available for the relevant service. If you think that sounds a bit too risky, it can be locked off so that it can’t be accessed by unauthorised users.

Setting effective and memorable passwords can be tricky. We are always told to use letters and numbers and mix lower case and upper case. For some reason that I cannot explain, I have an unnatural memory for car registrations. I can remember the reg numbers of my parents’ cars back to the early 1970s, so combinations of two or more can make a good strong password. Also, and again for reasons unexplained, I have ingrained on my memory postcodes of addresses I lived at in London. Add in the house number and capitalise the first lot of letters, and there’s another one.

One of the big temptations is to use the same username and password combination across everything. This is a serious no-no, because if your cover gets blown, you could be in serious trouble.

When Mac OS X Leopard was released a few months ago, one of the major features being promoted was Time Machine. This was Apple’s revolutionary approach to backing up, which creates incremental versions of files and documents that can be accessed by going “back in time.” So if you create a file on a Monday and amend it on Wednesday, and then on Thursday decide you actually wanted Monday’s version to work on, you can restore your current version of the file to the state it was in on Monday. When I upgraded, I set Time Machine up to back up to an external hard drive, even though I was already using SuperDuper! as a backup solution (and Mozy too. And Flickr for my photos. As you can see, I’m paranoid about data loss.)

I never had occasion to actually restore anything from any of my back-up sets till last week. I was writing a piece on this site about the death of Esbjörn Svensson, and was trying to embed an MP3 of one of his tunes into the post. Whatever happened, the page file got corrupted and threw up an error message when I tried to publish. I deleted the post, rewrote it without the MP3 and tried again. Same story. It was late and I was heading for France the following day, so I decided to leave it till I came back to sort out.

The whole site is contained as a single Rapidweaver file (called a sandwich), which is stored on the hard drive of my iMac, and backed up to my three back-up systems daily. So by the time I came back home, the corrupt file was now the backed up one. Normally, this would cause a problem, but because I have Time Machine, I was able to fix it quite easily. I just went back through Time Machine to the day before I started writing the post that caused all the problems, and brought that copy forward to the present, replacing the corrupt one. I then rewrote the post and voilà, it worked.

If it’s early June, then it must be Apple World Wide Developer Conference time. That means a keynote from Steve Jobs, which usually means new goodies. Not always mind, as the WWDC, as its name suggests, is aimed at third-party software developers, so the shiny new kit doesn’t always materialise at this time of year.

But this year it did. The 3G iPhone is on the way, and just looking at it now, it really is a magnificent piece of work. It looks like they overcame the initial problems of getting 3G the iPhone, such as battery performance, and then some. The only price we know of so far is the US$ one, and it starts at €199 for an 8GB model. This is half the current price for an original iPhone, and a third of the initial price of the 4GB model released just under a year ago.



Hopefully, O2 will launch it in Ireland with a decent price and contract, but based on their past form, I won’t be holding my breath.

The other announcement of note is MobileMe, or .Mac 2.0. This is a long overdue upgrade to Apple’s online suite of apps and utilities, and as a subscriber, I am delighted to see this one coming down the tracks.

Apple have a justifiable reputation as a company with a talent for marketing. Which is why I find it strange that they persist with O2 as their exclusive retail partner for the iPhone in Ireland.

An 8GB iPhone in Ireland will set you back €399 for the handset. The basic calls/text/data package for the iPhone costs €45 per month, and for that you get 175 minutes of calls, 100 texts and 1GB of data.

O2 are also the exclusive retail partner for the iPhone in the UK. There you can pick up an 8GB model for £269 (€334), with a basic monthly tariff costing £35 (€43.50). This tariff includes 600 minutes, 500 texts and unlimited data. Also O2 UK supports visual voicemail, while O2 Ireland does not.

It's been announced today that if you buy an 8GB model in the UK before 1 June, it will only cost €169 (€210).

I cannot understand for a moment why anyone in Ireland would buy an iPhone from O2 Ireland. Compared to the UK, the 8GB phone is almost 20% more expensive at normal prices (90% more expensive during the £100 off promotion). For a similarly priced tariff, our neighbours get 242% more minutes, 250% more text and ∞% more data.

As Pat Phelan calls it: the Paddy Tax.

I'd love to know how many iPhones have been sold in Ireland since it was launched just over a month ago. Surely if they priced the device in line with the UK and offered similarly priced tariffs, the iPhone would be a smash hit. As it is, the only incentive is to take a trip to Northern Ireland, buy one there and jailbreak it.

Come on Apple! Your "partners" are holding back the potential of your device!

I did a graphic design course a few years ago and during it developed an interest in typography. Since then I have become a font geek of sorts. (Just as I can tell the difference between an Australian and a New Zealand accent, so too do I know the difference between Helvetica and Arial.)

Which brings me to the point of this post. Found, via the excellent Daring Fireball (whose author, John Gruber is a font uber-geek), The Rather Difficult Font Game.

The server upon which it is hosted seems to be getting something of a caning at the moment. It flaked out on me on round 22, by which time I was enjoying a score of 19.

(Disclosure: I only cheated a teeny-tiny bit, and referred to Font Book once or twice, but only to confirm my suspicion.)

Anyone that reads my ramblings on a regular basis will know that I am an advocate of the Mac platform. In my last job I had a fair degree of autonomy and so when I went computer shopping, I was free to pick my platform of choice. Not so in my current employment, and when I started in January, I was given a standard-issue Dell laptop.

It's quite a good machine, in all honesty. It has a 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs of RAM and a 120 GB hard disk. Windows XP SP2 came pre-installed, and even though it's a big improvement on my last experience with Windows (W98), it's very frustrating to use at times.

There are days, like today, when everything you run crashes. Open an Excel spreadsheet. Crash. Try to extract an e-mail address from a message in Outlook. Crash. Try to drop an image into a Word document. Crash.

However, when I was in Dublin earlier today, I saw the electronic billboard at the top of Grafton Street and realised that I wasn't the only one having problems with Windows today. (I took the photo on my phone, so sorry for the poor quality.)

A new typographic expression is born - keming.

"Someone is wrong on the internet"

(both via Daring Fireball)

An old Joy of Tech, but a good 'un.

via MacUser

The Apple Store is finally coming to Ireland. Apple have announced that they are now recruiting for a new store in Victoria Square in Belfast, "North Ireland."



No dates yet as to when it's going to open. Or indeed any indication if there is to be any move to open a shop in "South Ireland."

In other Mac news, Apple have released an update to OS X Leopard, bringing up to version 10.5.2. Is it just me, or are these updates getting bigger and bigger? This baby weighs in at 343MB. Those DSL speed enhancements can't come a minute too soon!

via MacUser:

A UK based cruise company, who already owned the domain name cruise.co.uk, have just paid £560,000 (€668,000) to buy cruises.co.uk.

The new owner said that the the plural always came ahead of the singular in Google searches, and that they wanted their site to be "the first port of call" for searches.

Boom, boom!

I am paranoid about backing up. I use SuperDuper to back up my entire hard drive to an external HDD. I have complete copy of all my 4000-odd photos on a Flickr Pro account. And last month, I signed up to Mozy.

Mozy is an online backup system. It costs $100 for two years, and you back up all your data and media files to a server somewhere in California. If you have a lot of data to back up, this can take some time, given the pathetic upload speeds offered by Irish broadband providers.

I signed up exactly a month ago, and today the last of my 37GB of files got backed up.



From now on, it runs in the background. It also slowed my connection something chronic.

MacBook Paper:

Today's the day. Mac OS X, version 10.5, codenamed Leopard makes its debut. It's a little late, as we were all expecting it in the spring, but hey, at least we weren't waiting five years.

According to Apple, there are 300+ new feature in the OS. I'm not going to go into them here, as gigs of bandwidth are being plundered right now all over the internets, as hardcore Mac geeks go all a-quiver over such new features as Time Machine, the spiffy new Finder with Quick View, Spaces, the new iChat, Mail, Core Animation, etc.

Some links to give you an idea of what it's all about:

A guided tour, from the horse's mouth.

David Pogue in the New York Times points out some lesser-heralded features.

Crazy Apple Rumors goes down that route too, but gets sidetracked.

If you were to time travel and take a Mac with Leopard loaded on it back to 1973 and were to show some people then what computers will be like in the future, you could totally get some hot 1973 chick into bed with you! But make sure it’s not your mom, dude.

TUAW have cleared the decks for the next 24 hours in order to bring us a comprehensive guide to Leopard. This could result in the fewest references to the iPhone in a 24-hour period since before 29 June.

Also posted at CmdNotCtrl

It started with this: 10 Things Your IT Guy Wants You To Know

which merited the reply: 10 Things The Techno-Retarded Want The IT Guy to Know

which in turn caused John C.Welch of bynkii.com to respond: A response to the Tecno-Retarded

All good geeky fun.

Things have been quiet on the blog front for the last while, for one reason or another. Work has been quite busy, with a lot of toing and froing. I have found that I have had a dearth of ideas for posts, and those that do crop up seem like too much effort to write up.

But anyways, I'm on hols at the moment. I'm at home minding the little 'un. My sister, who looks after her during the week is away with her gang on their jolliers. My wife started a new job last month, so she can only get one week off, hence my status as a househusband this week. We will be on hols en famille next week.

The burtda went grand. I was working all day, but we managed to avoid the rain in the evening and get the barbie going. A nice piece of lamb was the order of the day, and we accompanied it with a nice bottle that we had originally planned to open last year on the 40th, but circumstances dictated otherwise. (Pontet-Canet 1966, in case you're curious.)

We were in Mayo last weekend, and took ourselves off to the beach on Sunday. Folly, you might think, but it was a lovely day on Cross Strand near Louisburgh. Not warm, as such, but very pleasant. I love the beaches around there, as the sea can be quite wild and dramatic, and also the fact that they are nearly always practically deserted. This weekend was no different, and with the exception of a few surfer d00dz, we pretty much had the beach to ourselves. It was Babba's first trip to the seaside, and she even got to dip her piggies in the Atlantic. Back home on Monday, and since then thankfully the weather has been holding up. Walks at Emo Court are a regular feature of our days this week, and in this weather, it's a very pleasant way to pass an hour.

So what's been going on? I had planned to write at length about the Darren Graham affair, and may yet live up to that ambition. That sort of nonsense should have no place in any sport. Hopefully the GAA will use the opportunity to do something positive.

The recent Irish Times series about "Rip-Off Ireland" almost inspired me to put fingers to keyboard, but so far I have manfully resisted. Maybe next week. Or then again, maybe not.

On the tech side of things, Fake Steve Jobs has been unmasked. Apple have released new iMacs, so my machine is no longer cutting-edge. Still, I got ten months or so on the frontline, so it wasn't too bad a stint. Also, the new iLife and iWork suites have been released. I have ordered my copy of iLife '08 already. And to top it all, my .Mac account goes up from a measly 1GB to a much more respectable 10GB of storage. Once I install Leopard, I will use some of that space to back up all my photos (to go with my current backup regime of external HDD, Flickr and monthly DVD burn.)

Next week is Aoife's first birthday, so there will be lots of excitement to be had. She has a new little cousin as well, who was born just three weeks ago.

Then there's the preparations for the World Cup coming up as well. Loads to write about, just have to find the time.

So that's it. The babba is having a snooze at the moment, but is due to wake up any minute, so I'd better sign off.

There was a survey in the news the other day which detailed the ebay habits of the Irish. Top of the list of ebay traders was Laois, who trade more per capita than any other county in Ireland.

Here's something that I maybe should have included in my "8 Things" post - I have never used ebay. I haven't even registered an account. I don't know why. It's not that I am unaware of it.

Any other ebay virgins out there in the Irish blogging community?

Just fucking sick, I tell you!

There have been a number of speculative items recently, both in the blogosphere and the Emm Ess Emm about who will be Apple's partner in Europe for the iPhone. I was doing a bit of research into the various companies and their respective networks, when I came across this on Wikipedia:



"Surely", I thought, "the poor fella doesn't go through life with a name like that."

I had a look at the main O2 website and searched for the names of the directors, and this is what came up:



So obviously, someone thinks that the CEO of Telefonica-O2 is a bit of a dickhead.

Update 11.07.07: The wikipedia entry has now been corrected.

The (London) Times reports today that O2 have secured the rights to the iPhone for the UK. Neither O2 nor Apple have confirmed the report.

Whatever happens, the deal done in Europe can't be done in the same way as the AT&T deal was done in the US. No carrier is present in all markets, so it's likely that all three of the big guys (O2/Telefonica, Vodafone and T-Mobile) will get some slice of the action. What will be interesting to see is who gets what in markets where two or all three of them operate.

The other issue is the technology. iPhone works on EDGE on AT&T, a technology that is inferior to the widely available 3G here in Europe. By the time iPhone arrives here, it could well be version 1.1 with 3G support. As long as it's not GPRS!

Tomorrow is iDay - the day that the American public finally get the chance to get their hands on the new wonder-gadget from Apple - the iPhone.



Here are a few predictions for what will happen over the course of the next couple of days or so.

Highly Likely

• AT&T's network grinds to a halt as thousands of new iPhone owners try to access their Web 2.0 resources on AT&T's decidedly un-Web 2.0 EDGE network.
• The first loss of an iPhone to a mugger will happen within an hour of the first one being sold.
• Some socially-retarded geek will record in his blog: "Jeez, man. I got this iPhone, like, three hours ago, and I still haven't gotten laid."
• Paris Hilton's name will be ignored by the main networks for at least an hour.
• Authors of "What's Hot/What's Not" lists in newspapers and magazines will trip over themselves to declare the iPhone "soooo last Tuesday."
• All stock will sell out within the first hour, meaning that several people who were camped outside their local Apple Store for days will be turned away empty-handed.
• Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer will lock himself in his study with his Zune, and pretend to ignore everything to do with the iPhone.
• On Saturday morning, Bono will walk in to his local newsagent in Dalkey, yakking into an iPhone, the only one in Ireland.
• After gaining massively, based on several months of iPhone hype and supposition, Apple's share price will fall once the mythical gadget becomes a reality.
• Several complaints will be made about the device, regarding missing features that Apple never claimed the phone would have in the first place.
• Pacific Catch, the San Francisco restaurant featured in the first iPhone ad, will be booked out for the next year.

Highly Improbable

• During the three-hour closure of the US Apple Stores tomorrow afternoon in preparation for the launch, huge Post-its will appear on the doors of all of them, bearing the legend "We'll be back soon"

• At 6 pm, Steve Jobs will appear on giant screens in all US Apple Stores, and declare "Fooled you all!! There is no iPhone. We just wanted to see how much you would believe. Instead, we are going to offer 30% off selected educational software!"
• George Ou, Rob Enderle and David Maynor will all slaver over the device and extol its virtues on their respective blogs.

In the meantime, from the essential "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs":

"Woman trades her child for spot at front of iPhone line"

and from iPhone Matters

"Dinner in Cupertino, June 28th, 2007"

And last but not least, David Pogue's review of the iPhone for the New York Times:

The above is apparently a real ad for Microsoft's iPod rival, the Zune. It purports to demonstrate the joys of "squirting", where one Zune user can transfer a music file to another via the devices' WiFi capability.

Fake Steve:

Best part is that the dopes at Microsoft creamed their jeans over it. Seriously, this has to be the lamest advertisement ever made. It looks like two dicks trading genital warts.

Tags: microsoft, zune, fake steve

New iPhone demo video on the US Apple site. About 20 minutes long it's available in three different file sizes and also for download. Damn, it's one nice piece of kit.

"Folksomony" is the most hated web-related neologism, according to a report in The Register.

WordPress is fast becoming the favoured blogging platform of many Irish bloggers. [I use it for my Mac and Rugby blogs.] This guy is not impressed with WordPress's approach to security [via DF]