.oO Tailwind

Wow. 3 for 3.

Okay, it’s Saturday, but you got last weeks a day early.

Reet bonkers slide show on the future of our planet and galaxy.

New street signs springing up all round London. Thanks Mr Hellens.

Some bonkers nanotech for you.

VideoJug shows you how to compose your photographs in this instructive little video.

Here are some batteries that charge via USB.

Photos from nuclear tests. Pretty scary but beautiful stuff.

For those who like cartoons, did you ever get into Calvin and Hobbs?

Ever wondered how to classify lists of animals..? What do you mean no?

Twango allows you to upload files that will automatically have geospatial data added to them based on the text associated with the file.

Based on consumer insight from over 1000 guests in 5 countries, Swisscom are about to reinvent hotel connectivity (thank God!). Called room 2.0 it’s an interesting story about innovation, whitespace and conducting primary research.

Google’s mission? To organise the world’s information. Maybe it’s now trying the Universe’s as Google Earth fans can now look upwards towards the heavens with the release of Google Sky. Part of the new 4.2 update Sky allows the user to explore the heavens and constellations across more than 1 million images.

Download the latest Google Earth here.

The 4.2 download has some other cool features but I haven’t played with these yet so let’s just talk space.

Anyone want to look at some 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies? Browse Orion?Images, not surprisingly, come from NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope. How awesome is that?

As a kid growing up, one of my favorite television programs was Tomorrows World on BBC 1. Imagine Maggie Philbin telling us how we can pan, drag and zoom through the heavens as we like..!

I wonder if today’s kids will get excited by this?

Apparently there are some other services around already that allow you to explore space in a similar way; Celestia, Stellarium and of course World Wind from NASA.

Accessing the ‘Sky’ mode requires pressing a button (look hard now). It’s a shame you just ouldn’t look-up, but the layers sound fairly interesting and you can even take tours of famous spacey-type locations such as the Andromeda Galaxy.

Apparently the sky that you see is appropriate to the day and time that you access it from but of course you’re location would matter too so I’m not sure how this works yet.

We’ve known about Shozu for a while now and have been using it to publish photos directly onto Flickr albeit not knowing how much it costs each time due to lack of transparency on the part of the networks. either way, we still keep playing because we love it.

I think that I was so enthralled that I could just get photos from my phone directly to Flickr (or whatever) that I didn’t really dive in to the other things that it can do. This post is a reminder, Shozu rocks on many fronts.

Shozu can upload images or video from your phone to any appropriate web service via API. It collects and remembers all your relevant user IDs for you and will act as a conduit between your phone and whatever service you like including Flickr, WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, Vox, LiveJournal, You Tube and a whole bunch more besides. Best if all it is free.

Apparently you can also hook it up to the BBC or CNN if you happen to be (un)fortunate enough to find yourself in a spot for some citizen journalism. Of course this requires foresight on the part of the user, but still very cool all the same.

Shozu Using Captcha

Originally uploaded by Snowbadger.

The only downside is that while networks continue to avoid allowing customers a flat fee per month, data charges lack transparency and are expensive and sending your 3 minute video clip to You Tube might cost you a few quid. Also, I’m not sure how you apply Creative Commons to these artifacts as you pass them to the likes of the BBC or CNN…?

Getting Shozu onto your phone is a little bit of a bind as I need the website to do so. It’s a shame that they didn’t make it easy to download via wap in my opinion but hey ho.

I’m currently sporting a Sony Ericsson w810i which is connected to the Orange network here in the UK so I have to go to Shozu’s website tell them my details and have the application delivered to my handset via wap-push. Of course, there is once again a leap of faith on your part, not knowing how much the download is going too cost. But in the interests of science, you’ll just plough on wondering what 267kb actually costs.

Still, all this is very nice but from a UX point of view it’s all a bit clunky. Any pictures I upload still require tagging, sorting, possibly even geotagging if I’m so inclined and the best place to do that is on the web.

Well, the new GPS enabled Nokias, see the N95, allow you to deal with one of those things as it’s now possible to autotag assets with geodata accurate to within 10m.

Yay, that’s meaningful to my Gran.

Apparently you have to run an app to unlock the functionality but the new version of Shozu will have a set-up function to do this for you. Aren’t they nice?

Anyway. This was just a reminder, I’m now off to start blindly sending images and video via Shozu to WordPress, Vox and You Tube.

I wonder how much it will all cost?

Continuing our foray into all things beta, I’ve scored access to Mailplane which is a Mac OSX desktop client for Gmail.

Sure, you can set up Mail to access Gmail, but you lose all the good stuff that Gmail provides such as labels, conversations etc.

Anyway, I’m just starting to play with it, so I’ll let you know what I think later.

Once again apologies for being away for so long but there is a reason. My Mac has recently had the mother of all crashes. Such a bad one by my experience that it’s worthy of a post here on Tailwind.

It all started with a ‘Software Update’ from Apple and ended in a hard disk failure and a brand new hard disk.

As usual, diligently, I kept my system up-to-date by downloading the recommended packages that perked up in my automated ‘Software Update’ application. Now, I trust Apple, so I’d expect certain things to just work. In fact ‘just works’ is a brand differentiator for Apple across all their touch-points, retail outlets, OS, hardware, service design and even Apple Care in my eyes. They often surprise me with “Oh that’s clever. That works.” Surprise and delight some call it.

/fanboy

Anyway there I am, system updated, all is tickety boo until I next shut my system down which was at the request of an air hostess enroute to Schipol Airport in the Netherlands.

I was on my way to our Amsterdam office (Lost Boys) to give a presentation of our best work from the London office and of course, I was working on it on the way. Who doesn’t?

Once the flight was up I wanted to start working again but it wouldn’t restart. It would boot-up seemingly well only to stall and hang just after loggin-in, teasingly showing me my desktop but with no icons or dock.

I spent the remaining 40 minutes on the flight starting, restarting and waiting patiently only to find my beautiful air hostess asking for me to turn it off again.

The story goes on with me trying to reboot in the security queue, at passport control and in the taxi.

Nothing.

I find myself sat in my hotel lobby using a unix command called FSCK or something..?

When a Mac user ends up in this territory, you know it’s going pear-shaped fast.

Eventually I get into our Amsterdam office and hand it over to Erwin in Tech Support who is licking his lips at the challenge, but simultaneously and knowingly shaking his head.

I go downstairs, meet my Dutch colleagues and have some interesting discussions about our work and later meet up with Erwin who’s managed to resurrect my HDD enough for me to rescue some data using some dark ninja unix skills.

He’s smiling. Challenge met. But has advice for me.

So what happened?

Well, Erwin said to me whenever you download these updates do two things:

1. Back everything up
2. Verify your disk permissions

The latest Mac OSX update killed my system due to poor process design. It should, as part of the install ask the user to first verify their permissions and make sure they’ve backed everything up.

While we all know everyone will ignore the second piece of advice the first is not obvious to most (me). Apparently there is potential to install updates over the top of an OS with improper permissions, this can send the machine into a tailspin and put you in a whole world of pain.

Luckily, and very smugly, I had recently started using Apple’s Back-Up software that comes bundled with a .Mac subscription, so I didn’t actually lose that much. The pictures of my family, those files from yesteryear and of course all my movies and music were safe.

Yay! Gooooooo Back-Up.

But come on Apple, why on earth doesn’t the update software process ask users to perform certain tasks or in the case of permissions, make sure that they do it. I could have lost everything.

I couldn’t believe that I was back in OS 8.x territory trying to zap PRAM, use Safe Mode, enter system commands and all that. It’s not bee something that I’ve had to do since upgrading to OSX as OSX has been a solid platform with very little going wrong.

Someone will probably reply and say that the two incidents are not connected (HD failure and the updates killing my system), but I really think that they are.

Who’s at fault? Me for not knowing to verify? Apple for poor process design? Or the air hostess who made me turn my laptop off?

My money’s on the hostess. She had that look in her eye.
Continue reading ‘The Day Mac OSX Died’