Sphaerula

Fourteen months ago I traded in my old iPod mini for a new 8-GB iPod touch. I think the price at the time was about $230, but I got a 10% discount for exchanging the old iPod mini.

Six weeks later, I dropped the iPod touch from waist height onto brick pavement and broke it; the impact created a dent in the metal back and apparently crushed some of the electronic components inside. (These things are surprisingly delicate.) I took it to the Apple store on Boylston Street in Boston and asked if they could fix it. The answer was no, but they offered me a refurbished unit in exchange for the broken unit and a little under $130. I have been using the refurbished iPod for over a year now.

Since I live in an urban area, I usually have wifi connectivity. (For example, when I’m waiting for the bus in Kendall Square, I get a good connection to MIT Guest wifi.) This means I don’t need to buy a smart phone such as the iPhone; I get nearly iPhone-equivalent functionality from two devices, my minimal cell phone ($40 a month with Verizon) and my iPod touch, saving me roughly $40 per month that I can spend on books or music.

I was slow to take advantage of all of the iPod touch’s capabilities, using it initially for listening to music, podcasts, and audiobooks. I usually commute to work by walking, a 45-minute trip each way. I can listen to two audiobooks per month plus quite a few podcasts during my commuting time.

The first apps I added were news-, information-, and book-related: New York Times, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, WeatherBug Elite, Stanza, and Shakespeare Pro. I find that the iPod touch makes for a great electronic book reader (although I still haven’t found a good app for reading PDFs of research papers).

Lately I’ve been taking advantage of the iPod touch’s abilities to act as a small pocket computer. I purchased the American Heritage Deluxe dictionary app ($35), and I feel like I’ve already gotten my money’s worth for that app alone because now I have an unabridged dictionary in my pocket and I use it all the time. I also installed the Facebook, LinkedIn, TweetDeck, and WordPress apps for managing my Web 2.0 presence. And recently I set up two new email addresses that I use primarily from the iPod touch with the Mail app.

Lately, I’ve begun buying movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. The TV shows are, in my opinion, an incredible bargain. I bought the first season (twelve episodes, 10 hours) of HBO’s Rome for only $20. Recently, I taught myself how to use Handbreak and VLC to copy my DVDs to mpeg files formatted for the iPod touch.

The result is that my little 8-GB iPod touch is feeling cramped for space. First of all, the 8-GB iPod touch actually has 7.66 GB of storage capacity. (Is the remaining 0.34 GB used for the operating system and included apps?) Second, I have almost 2 GB of apps installed, the dictionary being the largest. Third, I like to carry one or two TV shows or a movie with me, and each of these is roughly 0.6 GB in size. Fourth and finally, I like to carry plenty of music and audiobooks.

Consequently, I’m ready to buy a new iPod touch. The bigger models have 32 GB and 64 GB of storage and list for $300 and $400, respectively. However, rumor has it that the next model of the iPod touch will include a camera for stills and video, and I would find a camera quite useful. And rumor has it that Apple is about to announce its new tablet computer, allegedly named the iSlate. So I’ve decided to bide my time to see what Apple might announce in the next few months.

I put off upgrading the operating system on my MacBook Pro from Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) until I had free time over the holidays. These are my brief notes about how I performed the upgrade.

I needed to clean up the cruft that had accumulated in my system, and I needed to repartition my internal hard drive to remove a Windows partition and expand the partition devoted to OS X to the entire drive. Because repartitioning my internal drive was going to wipe out all data, I wanted to be very careful in having a complete copy of my old system before performing the upgrade.

I followed the upgrade instructions provided in Take Control of Upgrading to Snow Leopard, written by Joe Kissell. This e-book is well worth the $10 because it provides detailed advice on every step of upgrading to Snow Leopard.

In brief, I performed the following steps:

1. I cleaned up my directories and files.
2. I removed software that I no longer use.
3. I made a record on my backup computer of all license keys in case something went wrong and I needed to completely reinstall my applications.
4. I made a complete bootable backup of my entire internal drive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and I tested the backup by booting from it.
5. I booted my MacBook Pro from the install DVD and used Disk Utility from the DVD to remove the old partitions and create a partition spanning the entire internal drive.
6. I installed Snow Leopard.
7. I used the installer’s Migration Assistant to transfer my old applications and files from the backup drive.
8. I ran Software Update to update the system to OS X 10.6.2.
9. I created a fresh backup from Snow Leopard using Time Machine, preserving my Leopard backup for the time being on a separate partition of my external drive.

The result was an upgrade to Snow Leopard that is, so far, working with zero problems.

My biggest difficulty was in getting a complete backup of my internal drive onto my external drive. I have a Western Digital My Passport Studio 320 GB external drive, and during the weeks I have owned the drive, I have experienced many failures in the backup process where the computer loses its connection with the external drive. Yesterday, I experienced this problem using either the FireWire 800 or the FireWire 400 cable that came with the drive. I decided to try the USB 2.0 cable, and that has worked well so far, with no noticeable loss in speed writing to the disk. In case the problem was caused by bad sectors on the external drive, I erased the 120-GB partition I had created on the drive by writing zeros once using Disk Utility. If I remember correctly, this step will identify bad sectors on the drive and cause the drive to mark them not to be used.

Carbon Copy Cloner was so useful that I made a $25 contribution.

I own a Western Digital My Passport Studio 320 GB external hard drive, which I purchased a few weeks ago as a backup drive for my MacBook Pro. The drive came with three cables, a FireWire 800 cable, a FireWire 400 cable, and a USB cable. The drive obtains its power through the cable from the FireWire or USB bus. CNET has a review of an older model of this drive.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to create a complete backup of my MacBook Pro to the external drive. Unlike Apple’s Time Machine, Carbon Copy Cloner creates a bootable backup. I checked that I could boot my Mac from the external drive by restarting while holding down the option key. However, my external drive did not appear in the list of bootable drives. Perplexed, I performed a google search to see if other people had experienced this problem, and I found this solution at macosxhints.com.

The solution is to shut down my MacBook Pro and unplug the external drive, then boot while holding down the option key. Once the Mac presents the list of available boot drives, I plug in my external drive, whereupon the Mac adds the external drive to the list of boot drives. I use the arrow keys to select the drive and press the return key to boot from that drive.

After booting, I verified that my external drive had been used as the boot drive by checking that special icons were used for my System, Applications, and other folders. (Generic folder icons are used for these folders when they are present on a drive that was not the boot drive.)

After a long hiatus spent posting tweets on my Twitter account and diving into Facebook, I have decided to get back to posting to my blog.

One way to make blogging easier for me is to begin writing posts from my iPod touch. During a recent trip to Oregon, I found it necessary to set up email and Facebook access via my iPod touch so I could stay in touch conveniently with a friend I was hoping to meet for breakfast. Unfortunately, we couldn’t schedule the meeting, but I reached a new level for me in making use of social media.

While setting up my other social media accounts, I discovered the WordPress app for the iPhone and iPod touch. This is my first trial post, composed entirely on my iPod touch.

I have been contemplating purchasing a smart phone. The iPhone seems like the logical choice for me since I’m an Apple fanboy who has been using Macs since 1987 and iPods since 2004. But I have no interest in doing business again with AT&T, a company with whom I’ve had problems in the past. So if I were to buy a smart phone, I would get the Droid phone with Verizon, my current wireless carrier.

However, I can’t justify the additional expense of a data plan when I have a cell phone plan for a base rate of $40 per month on which I use at most 100 minutes per month. I have excellent Internet connectivity at both work and at home, so it’s only when I travel that I need a wireless connection. But these days it’s almost always possible to find a coffee shop that provides wireless for free or for a nominal price (e.g., Starbucks).

In fact, on my last trip to Oregon, my mother and I attended a Christmas concert at my brother Laird’s church. We arrived 45 minutes early to get good seats. To entertain ourselves, I used the church’s excellent wifi signal to show Mom what I could do with my iPod touch. We ended up on Facebook, where I found my brother’s wife’s photo album, and suddenly I was showing several people photos of my brother’s son. No wallet photos needed, just a connection to the Internet!

So I’m continuing to experiment with seeing how far I can go using just an iPod touch for email, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress. As a consequence, I’ll probably be spending a little more time in coffee shops, and maybe I’ll be able to make a few recommendations soon.