If you are the person who uses non-Apple headphones, but will want to use something in this form factor, sound quality is important enough to you that you’ll buy the damn third-party adapter.

It’s just that simple. Apple is aiming for a market segment, and that is people who want a small, lightweight, cool iPod. Do you have compromises with the design? Yes, but again … it’s not the iPod for you, more than likely.

Not every product that a company makes has to appeal to you.

So I’ve had the two PowerMates for a while, and I’m now putting them to good use. I won’t let the focus of this entry be how I’m using the PMs system-wide [another day, if you're interested], but suffice it to say that I’m using the PMs for awesome in Aperture.

Now, I’m biased by Fraser Speirs’s photo workflow; before I was ever serious about the concept, I had read what he was doing. I don’t do stack sorting—in fact, I just closed the tab so I won’t spend thirty minutes delving into same and stop writing this entry—but I do use the PowerMates to power through the weaning process. My ratings are much like Fraser’s—if it’s okay, going to get rated up to one start; if it’s crap, I reject it. Here’s where the PowerMates come in:

Left PowerMate: clockwise rates up, counterclockwise rates down.
Right PowerMate: clockwise advances in the set, counterclockwise goes back.

A wee twist of the wrist is all I need to rate something up or down, or to move back and forth. I think that adding in stacks will make this even more powerful for me, especially when I’m off of my current kick of sports photography and back into concert stuff, when taking eight or twelve exposures at a swath is about catching an expression or some light, not a pass or a shot or a hit. But it’s really quite quick for me: fire up Full Screen mode, position my hands, and make the snap decision.

I do my editing in passes, typically. I do the reject/promote run the first time through, culling the crap. The second pass, I’m looking for stuff that is two-star level: something about the frame catches my eye, and it’s either good as is or needs some cropping, tweaking, or other. And so-on until I get to at least three stars, sometimes four. Depends on the shoot and how much I’m looking to push out to Flickr—sometimes three stars is my bar, and sometimes it’s four. But with just a bare minimum of movement, I can fly through the editing.

What do I use other than the PowerMates? Well, besides Full Screen, I use the C shortcut to fire up the cropping tool and the ` to bring up the loupe. Between those two, plus using all of my 24″ of iMac real estate, I can power through stuff faster than I ever have—and I’m just getting started at doing this.

The beauty of the PowerMates is that you can program them to do lots of things—volume controls, keyboard shortcuts, scrolling. You’ve got global settings and program-specific ones. I’m just scratching the surface.

I’m just scratching the surface of what AHP can do, I know. I’m using Quick Record to do this because, well, I’m lame. But in my case, AHP is taking the audio output of Firefox and recording it as an Internet stream, 128kbps stereo AAC. It does everything in one big chunk, which I then feed to …

… Fission, which claims to be “Fast, Lossless Audio Editing”. And for what I used it for, it’s quite, quite true. Now, as a note, I’m okay with the lossiness here because 1) this is a transport medium and 2) I’ve already pre-ordered the CD. I am also that person who, when coming in contact with, shall we say, illicitly-gained audio, listens and makes a quick buy/trash decision. If I don’t like it, I trash it. Very simple. Again, I’m gonna want [and buy, and cherish, and let you pry from my cold, dead fingers] the lossless version, so what’s happening here is a net win. [Looking at you, RIAA.]

Suffice it to say that I’m a happy dude.

How I Transitioned to My Current Setup

Recently I bought a Drobo and 4TB of HDDs; I originally thought this would go to my home file server, but my newer Mac mini is still acting up. [Grrr.] Once I brought the Drobo online on my iMac, I created three 1TB volumes: geoFstop media, iTunes, and Residual. I think they’re named appropriately and don’t need discussion. I made use of Apple’s instructions on moving one’s iTunes folder and this Flickr discussion on how to move Aperture libraries. I still need to migrate the vault and my residual iPhoto library, but this has me up and running. Simply put, I went from only 90GB free on my iMac’s HDD to 338GB at the time of this posting. Yeah, I had a lot of data to move. Why? Well, my concert recording and photography is chewing up data like nobody’s business [but my own, heh]. I got serious about jumping my HDD capacity up when I saw myself eating 10-20GB a month on the iMac, between shooting RAW and recording in CD quality.

Software I Use

I’ve posted about backups before, and as I did then, I love SuperDuper! It really is what its name implies. Having a bootable clone of my iMac drive protects me against that drive dying in one important way: if my iMac’s drive dies, I don’t have to wait for a GeniusBar appointment and a replacement HDD to be put in to keep using my machine. This minimizes any downtime to get a working drive back in the iMac. I’ve even thought about swapping to the external drive for my main drive, hoping that the drive that would fail would be the one that gets more regular use. After all, external hard drives can be replaced in the time it takes to swap cables out.

On my Leopard-running Macs [which is everything save the iBook I'm about to find a new home and my older mini, which I will upgrade from Tiger soon], I also implement Time Machine, which is native to the OS. I wouldn’t use Time Machine as my sole backup system because of the time involved in restoring from a backup, but it works very well and can save your hide when your hard drive dies. Apple deserves kudos for baking a solid backup solution into its operating system, and I think this is a major, major selling point of using Apple kit. If you’re running Leopard and not backing up, you need to punch yourself in the face … repeatedly.

Hardware I Use

In short, I am using:

• My iMac’s base HDD, 500GB
• A Newer Tech miniStack v3, sized 500GB, to clone the iMac HDD to prevent downtime from that drive’s data loss.
• A Newer Tech miniStack v3, sized 750GB, to serve as a Time Machine backup for the iMac HDD in a belt-and-suspenders approach. This might seem like overkill until you realized that you deleted a file three days ago, which means your nightly-cloned 500GB HDD backup is going to be useless in saving your bacon. Time Machine has bailed my ass out several times, and it also made migrating to the iMac from my newer mini a very nice experience.
• The aforementioned Drobo, which is a FW800-capable 2nd-generation box. This is primary storage, as noted above, and I get about 2.7TB out of the four 1TB Western Digital Green HDDs I have in there.

For those really curious, the FW800 chain is: iMac > Drobo > 500GB miniStack > 750GB miniStack. I also have a Lexar FW800-capable CompactFlash card reader chained off of the end of all that. I’m thankful that the 24″ iMac blocks the sun and my view of most of the cabling.

Suggestions

Remember the joke about punching yourself in the face, repeatedly? My friend Bryan is doing that right now. This entry is written in part for him and for other friends of ours who’ve been a part of discussing Bryan’s misfortune today.

Obviously, what I’m doing with backups is expensive: the Drobo setup ran me about $900 [$500 for the Drobo and $400 for the drives], and the miniStacks ran me about $350 when I bought them. Throw in the $27.95 for SuperDuper! and this ain’t cheap, but I bet that, right now, Bryan would pay $500 to not be facing full data loss, maybe more.

If you’re running Leopard and are on a budget, I strongly recommend getting an external HDD [obviously, I love the miniStack, as I own five of them] and use Time Machine. Buy what you can afford, but I feel that your Time Machine backup solution should have 150-200% of the space your primary drive has. So if you have a base MacBook with a 160GB drive, get at least 320GB of backup space. At this point, the major price breaks in drives start happening past 750GB, as 1.0TB and 1.5TB are the top line of the marketplace right now. As of this posting, the 250GB miniStack v3 is $135.99, where the 500GB version is $154.99. $15 is not too much to spend on backup—and if it is, well, you’re probably also the person who uses the cheapest car insurance that you can and spend your time hoping to not ever be in a wreck.

If you have a bit more of a budget, I recommend a belt-and-suspenders approach, utilizing SuperDuper! to create nightly backups and Time Machine to create the incremental backups. This requires at least two drives, as SuperDuper! makes a complete clone of your main drive and can’t be used for anything else. If you have this, use a drive close to the size of your main drive and a second that is at least twice the size of the first. I was thinking about going to a 1TB miniStack for my iMac until I realized that I needed far more space than that. Now that I’m down to only 125GB of data on my iMac’s internal drive, I’m good for quite some time with 750GB of Time Machine goodness.

If you’re a semi-professional or a professional, you need to be RAID-ing or using a Drobo, but you don’t need me to tell you this. And if you’re one of those, you’re probably thinking of something like what I want in the future …

Vision of the Future

I’ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want: encrypted, incremental, offsite backups. Ideally, I want small boxes [Linux or minis, I don't care] that I take and put in my friends’ houses. I want to have an encrypted baseline backup when I place those machines in the field, and then I want to send encrypted incremental backups over the Internet to them. In return, I’m willing to host similar boxes for them. Here’s why:

• Offsite: if a natural disaster befells my house, I want my data backed up somewhere else.
• Incremental: I can back up offsite now [taking drives to a safe-deposit box, for example], but doing it incrementally means I’m never more than 24 hours out of date. Most of the time, I’m not generating large quantities of data—except, of course, when I go to a show and record. But you know, that’s the risk I take.
• Encrypted: because someone who breaks into my house, or Jeff or Stephen’s, doesn’t need to get my data and their data. Also, while I obviously trust these guys with my data, I don’t want to give them, oh, bank statements, passwords, etc. They don’t want to give that to me, either, and I wholly understand.

But this is still probably a few years away, yet, from reality. Yes, there’s Tarsnap, but he’s a single point of failure. Plus, I would rather host with people I know and trust than those I don’t.

Questions or comments? Love to hear from you on this.

BRILLIANT!

Authorized Mac Reseller: Has had this unit in its hands three times, has never fixed the underlying problems, never returns my calls, and takes 7-10 days to fix the unit.

Apple Store: I visited the Genius Bar yesterday, we looked together at the issue, they agreed that the unit was kaput, said it’d be 4-5 days … then went and looked to see if they had the part in the back. They did. Tonight? I get a phone call just before closing, telling me that the unit’s fixed, and they’ve run unit tests, and everything seems to be okay. On a holiday weekend, and they called me.

Yeah, they’re getting my return business.

Three weeks ago tonight, my 500GB miniStack V3 started screeching something awful—clearly beginning its death throes. I ran a quick Time Machine backup, said a prayer, and hoped it would hold together until the backup finished. It did, and as soon as it was done, I pulled the drive out of service and filed an RMA request with Other World Computing, the vendor I’d bought the drive from. I got them the drive off via UPS that Saturday [it was a crazy, crazy week], and I had the replacement drive last Monday.

Except, 111GB into a 305GB file transfer, the replacement drive woke me out of a dead sleep [it had been an even longer week prior, running almost 70 hours in seven days' time]. The new drive was, too, dead. I returned it the next day, and the drive got there on Friday. Monday, my replacement shipped. It arrived today.

Anyhow, I saw that it was at the house a little before three this afternoon, so I took my “lunch” break [one of those days; I was up at 0400, so I'm fading fast now], came home, and put it into service. I was a bit surprised when the drive mounted … already labeled like I wanted, with my data on the drive. “THOSE BASTARDS!” was my first mental thought, but then I read the packing slip. Bad fan in the casing. Ahh. Makes sense, especially for a new-out-of-the-box drive, y’know?

Anyhow, seven hours later, with 305GB moved, I’ve now got tunes again. Wilco’s “Impossible Germany” has never sounded so sweet.

Predictably, this HDD failure came less than ten days after I finished getting all the music off of my old machine. The only backup I had was the Time Machine backup. I’d never really tried TM before this event, and I must say … I’m reasonably impressed. The UI is still a little non-intuitive for me, but that might be because I spend half my day on a PC and sometimes think like a PC guy even on a Mac. Either way, it works. That said, you can imagine that I’m going to get another 500GB HDD ASAP and use SuperDuper! on it. Not having my tunes has been like lopping an arm off, especially with all that’s happened in the last three weeks.

I will have to pull everything off the miniStacks and add peripheral by peripheral to figure out the problem.

Yeah, this is gonna suck.

First, UtM took on code signing in general:

Like most technologies, code signing itself is neutral, or ought to be. It can be used for good or evil. Code signing is basically a way to cryptographically prove the origin of a particular piece of code, nothing more.

Yeah, it’s just like any other tool. They go forward and talk about code signing in the main branch of OS X, where Apple seems to slowly be requiring code signing for all applications, which I think is generally a good long-term goal. RA objects to the path going forward, which is somewhat understandable:

Ultimately I think the trend is bad. Code signing itself is a neutral technology, but it gives incredible power to the system vendor, and that power is just waiting to be exercised and abused. I believe that the iPhone is serving as a testbed to see how users and developers will react to an environment with ubiquitous code signing and control. If it goes well I think we can expect to see our desktop Macs gradually move in this direction as well. Judging by how badly Apple’s developer servers were flattened during the SDK release it seems like there’s no way it won’t go well.

I’m sure it will be a gradual process. If 10.6 ships and suddenly nothing will run without Apple approval there will be a huge revolt among users and developers. In 10.5 it’s pretty much innocent. In 10.6, given what Apple has revealed, I would expect to start seeing some restrictions in place. Perhaps initially there will be some APIs which are only available to signed applications. At some point Apple will decide that there are some areas of the system which are too dangerous to let anyone in, even when signed. Perhaps you will begin to need Apple approval for kernel extensions, or for code injection, or other such things. Then one day Apple may decide that unvetted code is too dangerous. Maybe advanced users could still be allowed to use it, but a setting may show up, “Allow unapproved applications”. It will, of course, be off by default.

I think it’s reasonable to expect the arguments in the second paragraph to come true, save for Apple requiring approval on the apps. I don’t think that Apple is using the iPhone code-signing process to gradually close their ecosystem; I have this feeling that Apple is doing two things: 1) gradually opening the iPhone ecosystem and 2) placing themselves in the iPhone app revenue stream. The second point is obvious—Apple will take home 30% of the app’s sale price in return for hosting the download, processing the payment, etc.—but the first is probably not. Yeah, you can jailbreak your iPhone and do all sorts of geeky things with it,but most users aren’t going to—I certainly haven’t. Allowing apps into the ecosystem, even under Apple control, is an opening, not a closing, of the ecosystem. Maybe Apple never opens it any more than this, but in providing a won’t-break-your-warranty path and a fairly trustable path for users, this will be a net win for the user.

[And if you don't like it, well, there's gonna be this Android system that Google is doing that will be open, etc. And that'll be good, in its own ways. If someone builds a killer handset with it, it oughta grab some market share. Me, I welcome my Cupertino overlords.]

The second UtM post, a bit more iPhone focused, is on the limitations of the iPhone SDK, especially the no-background-apps bit:

I don’t mean to suggest that an application like Switcher should come from a third party on the iPhone, merely that such feats of magic are possible on open platforms. As it stands today, as a developer who much wants to take the iPhone to the next level, I must constantly watch to avoid running afoul of Section 3.3 of the SDK license. I must ask “does this go too far?”, and worry about pushing legal limits instead of mental ones. When Andy implemented Switcher, such thoughts never crossed his mind once, and he was able to create something spectacular as a result. We hope that Apple will see the potential of their great little device, and allow developers to push it to its utmost as well.

I think the issue here is that the assumption is that this is where the iPhone app line will be held. The post references Apple not allowing the first Macs to multi-task and how Andy Hertzfeld wrote Switcher to make it happen. And … well, I think that’s apt, but not in the way that RA wants—they seem to want it all, and want it now. I, as a user, well, I just don’t. The iPhone is a nascent platform—really quite revolutionary in terms of what can be done on a device that does everything it does and still have enough battery life to get you through the day. [Okay, enough derisive snorts.] I think that a 3rd gen iPhone might allow 3rd party, background-task apps. I really do. But to do so now is to do too much, too fast.

If I’d actually read The J Curve, I’d make some argument about how this argument applies here, too, and that Apple has to be a bit restrictive now, slowly opening things up over time. Or I could make an argument that Adam might appreciate, and note that, when leading, it’s always easier to start off the hard-ass and ease up than it is to get more restrictive after being Mr. Nice Guy. Both responses work on the same point: restrictions provide initial stability that allows for maturity, whether it’s in the classroom, the office, or the software world.

Maybe I just think too well of Apple.

And lastly, well, it seems that RA is taking the Mark Pilgrim approach and filing bugs about things that they don’t like with the iPhone SDK. I guess that, when all you have is a hammer …

Just my thoughts for now. I reserve the right to change my mind in the face of stronger counter-arguments.

• rm -rf ~/Library/Mail
• rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

Do I have to do more? Yes, I backed up ~/Library/Mail and the .plist before I did this. [I'm not that dumb.]

Suggestions desired. People who tell me to use GMail will get my foot up their ass.

[1] The true test will be this: I’m heading out of town for three days tomorrow, and I will leave Launchbar, iPulse, iTunes, Camino, and Seasonality up and running while I am gone. [Not NetNewsWire, because I imagine that I will read news in the hotel room at night. NNW is the only other program that I have up at pretty much all times, but to sync NNW properly, you best only have one instance of it running at a time.] If I come home with none of those programs in need of a Force Quit, life will be good.

2304 CDT: Looks like the indexing of Camino’s history was hanging up. Because I have a ridiculously large History file [I kept it at 365 days until just now], it was just taking forever to index. I changed the configuration in LaunchBar [Open Configuration, deselect the Camino History checkbox] and then opened Terminal to kill the process [ps -aux | grep "perl", look for the process ID, kill -9 process_id] and my load went back to normal. Learn something new every day, I guess …

Things I like:

• Speed. Oh my, I didn’t realize how sluggish Firefox on my Mac was being until I switched. [Note: my iBook doesn't struggle as much, because it has 50% more RAM.]
• Mac-iness. Like everyone else, I recognize that Firefox-on-Mac is not Mac-native feeling. This really doesn’t bother me much, because I spend ~40% of my computing time on PCs at the office. But there are little Mac things that Camino does that Firefox-on-Mac doesn’t. Mainly, it revolves around using Gecko with OS X GUI goodness, rather than relying on XUL and then having a XUL-to-Mac-GUI abstraction layer. If you’re thinking, “Oooooh, abstraction layers, no wonder it’s slow,” well, yes. And it’s also non-Mac.
• Minimalism. I’m glad that I can’t glom everything onto it. Having been on Facebook since before Applications turned some users’ Facebook pages into MySpace-on-white-bread, I can appreciate minimalism. [Note: the users most likely to have 47 Facebook Applications installed were people who used MySpace before they used Facebook hardcore. When you don't know better, you want the kitchen sink.]

What I don’t like:

• The lack of a home button/the funky home keyboard shortcut. Shift-Cmd-H? Really?
• The lack of a keyboard shortcut to take me to the search area.
• Furthermore, I miss the extensibility of multiple search engines—and yes, I know I can add them, but the process of adding them is such a pain in the ass. One thing I love about Firefox is Mycroft, which allows you dozens of site-specific search engine access points. There are a handful of sites [Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, IMDb] where I find these things very useful, and I miss them on the Mac.
• No Ctrl-Tab rotating through tabs.
• Firefox’s Cmd-Return shortcut for taking “cnn” in the address bar and making it “www.cnn.com”.

Camino is going to be my main Mac browser for the next little while. Firefox could win me back with better performance [unlikely, given the bloated nature of the FF codebase], or maybe going to a faster Mac in the late fall will help things. Not sure. But for now, me and Camino are good.

The trade-off is that tap-and-drag is not available for selecting a range of text. I’m convinced this trade-off is worth it, if for no other reason than that I primarily use my iPhone for consuming — reading, viewing, listening, looking — far more than I use it for creating. Scrolling is important for reading; selecting is importing for writing. Better for the iPhone to optimize for reading.

Grubes nails it for me. I’ve been thinking about getting rid of my iBook, and today when I went down to my grandmother’s, I only took the iPhone. I consumed plenty of things on the Internet while I was down there, but given that I wasn’t going to create anything, it was just fine. And honestly, I don’t find myself creating much while on the road. So I think I probably will get rid of the iBook. iPhone consumption FTW!

Restoring the iPhone and re-synchronizing it after the restore worked last time, and I expect that’s what I’ll do tonight. But man … this is frustrating. As Jeff said at lunch, “Ahh, the joys of a 1.0 product.”

A few minutes later: Now the amount of “Other” disk space is far smaller, on the order of the size of calendars and contacts, and the music can be re-sync’d. Perhaps my “let me not sync music twice, then pray” trick worked.

“Ooooooh, pretty!”

“I can tell you’re checked out of this meeting. Why don’t you just go ahead and leave?”

“You got an iPhone?! We need to get $co-worker in here … we were talking about them just last week.”

“Yeah, Geof claims that his Treo died. I don’t believe him.” [said as I walked out of a meeting to answer a call from my business manager ... tried not to flip my colleague the bird for pulling my leg]

“It’s just too much fun, isn’t it?”

“So, has that gotten you any babes yet?” [my boss]

But here’s what makes Lam’s review slam-worthy: the conclusion:

One more thing. What took you guys so long to review this? And where are the fanboys I know and love/hate?
Like you, I’ve coveted the idea of an Apple phone since it wasn’t any more real than a unicorn. And when it was delivered last Friday, almost seven months after the announcement at Macworld 2007, the hype and spin were so thick, there was no way anyone could write an objective review. Ten days after I camped, plunked down $600 for one, and signed the two year contract, I think I have the perspective to understand what it means to live with this phone. Many reviews abound, but I don’t think anyone has written about it from the perspective of ownership yet. That’s my take on the situation. My mind is clear; this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

Ten days? Really? I know that we’re living on InternetTime these days, but ten days is an eyelash blink. That’s what makes the “I want to defend the skeptical nature of this review” thing so laughable. Ten days isn’t enough time for anyone to evaluate it.

Face it: most everyone who’s bought one to this point is a gadget geek. [Check.] Whether or not the device truly has any lasting impact isn’t going to be known for some time yet—probably not even in 2007. Sure, you’re going to see brisk early sales for a device that’s this hyped—just like Hollywood blockbusters have an initial boomlet. But for an early adopter to argue that ten days gives him enough perspective … sorry, I don’t buy it.

[My initial feelings on the iPhone---with just three full days of ownership---are twofold: one, I really like using it, and two, I really like watching other people use it. But I really only care about the first in the long run; the second just strokes my considerable ego.]

When my Treo started doing random weird shit this morning, I … changed my mind. Stifling the urge to eject it from my vehicle while cruising at 69 mph down US 72, I pulled into the AT&T store in Corinth, MS and purchased an iPhone. 4GB, if you must know, but that’s because I’m not a wicked crazy iPod user, and I really want to replace my Treo as a light Web/email device [I'm no Crackberry guy like Alex, who has plenty of reason to not be using his iPhone as a primary device for him] that also happens to be a phone. If it’s an iPod, too, well … bonus.

I activated it when I got to my folks’ house, and after I really got into it, I … flipped my lid.

I like it. Will it replace my iBook? No. Will it replace my Treo, for what I used it for? Absolutely. I can stop fighting with my Treo to make it play nice with my Mac—Contacts worked fine, but iCal never really seemed to behave—and let a native device work with a native device.

:sigh: I’d hoped that my new Mac this year was going to be a new desktop, not a new palmtop. [And don't make any mistake, folks ... this is a tiny computer that happens to make phone calls.] But hey … I wasn’t really happy with the Treo, and when it came time to replace it, I was going to replace it with an iPhone. That just came a whole lot sooner than it did.

Okay, time to stop blogging and go back to hanging out with my parents [the real reason for the trip today].

It took me 20 minutes and a restart just to hook him up to my WPA2 network. Hell, my TiVo only took two minutes to do that.

I think it’s time to look into setting up Electronic Funds Transfer to 1 Infinite Loop. It’ll be easier that way…

My G4 iMac seems to eat keyboards.

A few weeks ago, I couldn’t roust the Mac from sleep because I couldn’t enter a password. A nine-character password that uses keys on both halves of the keyboard and four numeric characters yielded one character entry. Thinking the keyboard was just old and shot, I replaced it with a brand new Apple keyboard. Things were fine for a week or so, and then … the same thing happened.

Does anyone know what’s going on here?

The early result tells me that I don’t want to run this on a machine that I’m also using—Xt doesn’t slag the mini, but the CPU levels are running pretty high, and I expect I’d get a bunch of spinning beachballs if I kept it up. But I do have Misty’s old iMac, and I bet it’d run it just fine. [In case you're curious, I purchased a license for Xt from my previous use of it: I bought both the multi-computer household license but also the lifetime upgrades. I believe in the software that much. Thanks to Alex for pointing me to it.]

If this goes well, I expect to have all my PCs as closet hangar queens by the end of the month.

Bad move. All the data on my Palm? Gone.

“OH, SHIT!”

I’ll just sync with .Mac.

Nothing.

I then run for the iBook, Cmd-Space ADD, and … PHEW! Data, blessed data. File–>Backup Address Book immediately. I then sync with .Mac, which overwrites everything on the iBook [because .Mac thinks my mini is newer, since it's synced more recently]. After “wiping out” the iBook’s Address Book install, I then revert to the backup, then re-sync again. Now .Mac thinks the iBook is newer [it's been synced last], and then sync to the mini. The Palm is now syncing back up. I might have a contact or two lost—the last sync on my iBook was on Monday—but it’s saved my bacon.

Now I’m working to make sure that my additional backups of iCal and Address Book are automated and robust. The SuperDuper!-ing I’m doing every night won’t protect against data being deleted, and I need to protect against that, too. Now I must find a good solution for date-based backups of Address Book and iCal. You can never be too paranoid about backing up your data.

[Still don't know for 100% that I'll re-up with .Mac, but it's far more likely now.]

• FlexTime
• Meridian

If any of you have used ‘em, I’d love to hear your inputs.

Uninstalling TiVo Desktop for the Mac proved a little confusing, but Google helped me to find out how: go to System Preferences, stop the process, bring up Finder, run a search, and trash everything. Darn non-disk-image apps.