If you want to watch YouTube video on the plane (and Google TechChannel has some amazing collection of videos), here is how to save it to disk, without any tools or third party program, using just your Mac and Safari out of the box.
Go to YouTube page and select video you are interested in in Safari. While playing, press Option-Command-A which opens Activity window. Locate the video stream - it will be the largest item in the list. Double click it, which causes Safari to download it.
If this thing is real, I am buying one. Regardless that I really, really do not need another Mac :-). Form factor of thin screen of size 9-12 inch, with reasonable subset of touch gestures would be EXACTLY what I need from a internet terminal / reader. Plus the option to tether it with iPhone for ubiquitous connectivity ...
Finally - the new version of Things on iPhone can synchronize with Things on Mac desktop.
It actually works - no strings attached. Assumed that:
1) the WiFi on iPhone is on
2) iPhone and Mac are on same network (so that Bonjour magic can work)
3) the Mac Things is running when you start Things on iPhone
the synchronization happens automatically and is VERY fast (few seconds max).
Finally a portable GTD application that works for me :-).
A comment got to me via friend mentioning why am I suddenly so negative about Apple and Macs, which quite surprised me. True, I have had some serious hardware issues in first two weeks of June, but this negative event was about as much positive experience as hard disk crash can be.
Thinking back what I have learned and discovered from this:
- Time Machine actually works
- it pays to plug in the firewire disk with Time Machine backups every day - the two second operation saves a lot of time in long run
- Carbon Copy Cloner is fantastic tool that makes creating bootable copy of your system disk as easy as possible
- I can easily use multiple bootable disks with various versions of OS-X, not only for backing up but also for trying out new things / installs - a kind of "VM on a disk"
So, after few days working diskless, I am back to normal operation mode. About time, we are late with last episode of screencast ...
The copying of external disk went error free and took almost 5 hours (210 GB). Fortunately, the MBP was usable - I did not want to modify too many files, but it was perfect for Web research and writing in Google Docs.
After reboot, the TimeMachine decided that 85 GB needs to be backed up again. This seems like bug in TimeMachine, because I have not really changed much more than few gigs - 4-5 max during the few days.
So, I have positive proof that the file system crash of last week was not a software problem in Leopard, but indeed caused by hardware failure. After restoring system from Time Machine, things looked pretty good - everything seemed to work. I was able to re-render the screencasts I have lost - I mean I have lost converted AVI files and MP4 files, not the "source" MOV files. I worked on Mac over Saturday and Sunday. Because my Time machine does not backup virtual machine images, I had even whopping 65 GB of free space :-). I saw a bit more of beachballs, but I thought (wishful thinking) it is because Spotlight is busy rebuilding index ...
It happened on Wednesday afternoon. I knew something is wrong with my MacBook Pro immediately - when I saw semi-dark screen, unresponsive machine - even mouse cursor was frozen - and heard fans blowing full speed, making the strange, clicking noise coming from inside almost disappear ...
OS-X does not freeze too often, but it can happen and as a matter of fact, I have seen it happen before during my almost two years with Mac, so I did not panic. As expected, the Alt-Option trick did not work, so all I could do was to force power off.
Today I tried for the first time the iDVD 08 with intention to create DVD version of the screencast - just to find out that the application dies right after the start. From the error report (thanks for that) the problem was in missing dependency Oxygene framework - a module similar to Windows DLL. Here is the error message:
[sourcecode language='xml']
Link (dyld) error:
Library not loaded: @executable_path/../Frameworks/Oxygene.framework/Versions/A/Oxygene
Referenced from: /Applications/iDVD.app/Contents/MacOS/iDVD
Reason: image not found
As if the yesterday's Firmware update issue was not enough, I had very strange experience with iMovie 08. Suddenly, for no obvious particular reason the user interface became very unresponsive, I was not able to select project in project library. Switching Event library and Project windows on or off stopped working. Windows were not redrawn properly. Creating new project had no visible effect. I could not click on project to select it (well, technically I *could* click, but nothing happened). The time sliders in Events and Projects were either disabled or invisible ...
as long as you are Safari Books online subscriber - see it here.
Completely updated with XCode 3.x and Objective C 2.0. The screenshots even show the iPhone project templates, indicating the XCode 3.1 in some places. So far the only difference against reality I have found is not covering the XIB resource format (which is generated by default) and sticking with NIB. This blog entry has good explanation of the difference.