oceanliving - tech

Since buying an 5th Gen 80Gb ipod I have had to deal with the dreaded restore loop, and thought I’d show how I finally fixed it in case it helps anyone else.

I am using a Macbook running OS X 10.5.2, and iTunes 7.6.2, though one of the screen shots is from a PC.

The restore loop begins when the ipod comes up with the screen on the left, asking you to connect to itunes and restore your ipod.

When you connect, itunes shows the screen below. Clicking the restore button will wipe the ipod and return it to factory settings. If it is the first time you have done a restore it will take a little while for itunes to download the ipod firmware file, subsequent restores will be much quicker.

So far this is exactly how things are meant to work. The problems begin when the ipod restarts.

It should then reconnect to itunes and appear ready to be named and filled with music.

Instead the restore screen reappears and itunes says “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore”. Repeated restores follow the same cycle.

Looking on the web there appear to be a few different solutions that people have found. Firstly for PC users, renaming drive letters can sometimes solve the issue. More info on this can be found here.

The next solution that works for some people is to put the ipod into disk mode and then connect it to itunes. Before placing the iPod into disk mode, you should verify that it is charged.

First toggle the Hold switch on and off.

Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons for at least 6 seconds until the Apple logo appears.

When the Apple logo appears, release the Menu and Select buttons and immediately press and hold the Select and the Play/Pause buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears, (as shown to the right, it will say Disk Mode at the top of the screen).

Connect the iPod to your computer; the screen on the iPod will change and say “Do not disconnect”, and the ipod should appear in itunes and in Finder. Detailed instructions can be found here.

This worked for me to begin with. When connected my ipod appeared in itunes as a new ipod, I named it and could copy music to it. Unfortunately when I ejected the ipod I got this screen to the left as expected, but it stayed jammed on that screen and would not let me access the music.

I had to reset the ipod to get off that screen.

Resets are done by turning the Hold switch on and off, and then pressing and holding the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears (about 6 to 8 seconds).

My ipod then reverted to the “Connect to your computer, use itunes to restore” screen, and I appeared to be back to square one.

After more searching online I decided to try using an older version of itunes as some people mentioned issues starting with itunes 7.

I downloaded itunes 6.0.5 from oldapps.com, and replaced my existing itunes installation with it. I had to re-import all of my music into this older itunes as it would not recognise the itunes 7.6.2 library.

Once this was done I put my ipod which was still displaying the “Connect to your computer, use itunes to restore” screen into disk mode and connected it.

It displayed the “Do not disconnect” screen and then itunes showed a message saying something along the lines of “This ipod requires a newer version of itunes”, and the ipod did not appear in the itunes sidebar. I quit itunes and saw that the ipod was appearing in Finder (as it should in disk mode), so I ejected it and lo and behold it ejected properly, and the music I had put on it back when it had been connected to itunes 7.6.2 was there!

I re-installed the latest version of itunes and the ipod connected straight away and ejects as it should. I have been a little wary of exploring more so far, but I will see how it goes and update this page if it stops working or I fiddle any more.

I assume that the software clitch that was kicking the ipod back into restore mode was somehow connected to itunes 7.6.2 but I do not know how, or why, the loop was broken by trying and failing to connect to itunes 6.0.5?

I hope this might help someone out there. Please let me know if you find any other solutions and I’ll add them here as well.

After months of waiting I finally got my grubby little hands on a shiny new iphone when a friend brought me one back from the States. For those who have managed to avoid the media frenzy over this latest and greatest gadget, the iphone is Apples new mobile phone, emailing, web browsing ‘toy’. It is a quad band gsm phone, has wi-fi so you can surf the net anywhere with a wireless internet connection and has been available in the USA since July but only on the mobile provider AT&T’s network.

It is due to be released in Europe around the beginning of November but will be locked to the provider Apple has signed an agreement with in each country. Such as 02 in the UK and Orange in France. This will of course make roaming internationally very expensive as anyone who has spent travelling will understand.

Fortunately there have been a lot of clever people working on breaking the ‘Lock’ on the phones so that they will work with any provider. They had just succeeded when Apple released a new version of the phones software that broke all of these ‘hacks’. I was lucky that my friend picked up the phone a few days before Apple released their 1.1.1 software update. As my phone had the previous 1.0.2 firmware I was able to ‘jailbreak’ (access the phone so that you can add new software) and ‘unlock’ (so you can use any sim card) using the tools and techniques developed by the amazing iphone dev wiki team and more specifically the step by step instuctions for Mac OS X from modmyiphone.

The unlock process took about an hour and there were a few steps that I had to repeat until they worked. The most frustrating part for me was running the AppTapp installer. This Mac OS X program loads an application called installer.app on your iphone that can then be used to download the remaining tools directly over the phones wi-fi connection. Because our internet connection on the boat is rather slow at times and the AppTapp program involves a 90Mb download it took a while to complete.

So far I have tried Italian, Spanish, US and UK sim cards, and all have worked flawlessly. They are all pay-as-you-go cards so do not have an Edge GPRS internet connection, but as the iphone has wi-fi this has not proved to be a problem.

To create a personalised link to your facebook public profile you need to make a badge. A badge is simply a customisable clip of your facebook profile that you can share on other web sites.

To access the facebook badge page click on the “Create a Profile Badge” link at the bottom of your profile page. If you have trouble with this, as I did, then you can access it by clicking the Help menu in the bottom right of your facebook page, and then typing ‘badge’ in the help search bar.

Using facebooks badge creation wizard lets you choose what information to show on your badge. The badge will be automatically updated if you change your profile information and you simply paste the resulting html code in your blog or website where you would like the badge to appear.

Of course using the badge wizard also limits the variations you can apply to your link. To end up with the badges seen on oceanliving.org I used the facebook link targets and then modified the badge images using Photoshop and CocoThumbX to round off the corners and add the drop shadows. These images will now not update with changes to the underlying facebook profiles but they are a better fit for the page.

Due to a melt-down by my nokia 5500 I have recently been using a motorola razr as my main mobile phone. Despite it having the worst designed address book I have ever had the misfortune to use, it does sync with my mac quite well so I have made do whilst waiting for the the iphone to finally appear.

One thing that had been getting on my nerves was the lack of predictive text when sending messages. Finally I found this post which tells how to change the text input settings.

Downloading content from a website can be easy or slightly more tricky depending on the browser you are using. Macworld recently posted a how-to article on the finer nuances of using the activity window in Safari, including how to download embedded content easily.

The Activity pane opens by hitting ‘option-cmd-A’ or selecting ‘Activity’ from the Window menu. This then shows the individual components that make up the web page. If there is a certain item you want to download (an embedded movie clip for example) simply Option-double-click on that item and it will start downloading. Of course this should only be used on content that is legally available for downloading, not sites like Youtube that are streaming only. You may need to add a .mpg extension to the downloaded file if it downloads without one.

After a few months of using Apple’s Mail I recently decided to have another go at using IMAP for my email rather than POP. IMAP has several advantages not least of which is the ability to synchronise your messages between your local computer and the remote email server. This gives a full backup of your email and allows access to your email from any computer.

In my experience Apple Mail falls down quite badly in it’s imap intergration, particularly when using a slower connection as I am normally forced to do.

There are several alternatives available for OS X including Entourage, Thunderbird, Mailsmith, Eudora and many more. After trying most of these I narrowed my main requirements to four:

1. Full OS X Address book integration.
2. Multiple account and multiple SMTP servers support.
3. Plain text & HMTL.
4. Quick and efficent on and offline imap support.

In the end all of the email clients above fell short in one area or another. I had tried Gyaz Mail in the past but it had lacked imap support until version 1.5 was released.

After giving Gyaz 1.5 a go for the 40 day trial I was happy to cough up the US$18 for the full license and a month or so later I am still using it as my main email client.

There are a few annoyances. No unified inbox for one (all accounts have a seperate inbox). Secondly there is no built in spam filter, there is the option to integrate Spam Sieve, a third party filter but that costs an extra US$30. In my case my primary email host fastmail does an excellent job of reducing spam so I don’t miss it too much.

Overall Gyaz mail works well and most importantly the imap connection is fast and works flawlessly. No hanging up as Apple Mail used to, quick checking of all the imap folders and sub folders and full OS X Address book integration. Have a look and see what you think.

OS X comes with some very nice screen savers and I’ve been wanting to use some of the pictures in them for my desktop background?

Thanks to a hint from Macworld this is how to do it.

The following screensavers have images you can use - Beach, Cosmos, Forest, Nature Patterns, and Paper Shadow, and the images are stored in the ‘/System / Library / Screen Savers’ folder (the system folder is seen circled here).

Open the folder and ctrl-click on Beach.slideSaver (or whichever other you want to use), and choose ‘Show Package Contents’ from the drop down menu. When the new window opens, navigate to ‘Contents/Resources’ to see the pictures.

Now you can copy the images to a more convenient location. I have made a folder in the ‘Pictures’ area of my user account for all my Desktop backgrounds.

Finally to use these pictures as your desktop background go to ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ in System Preferences (on the apple menu in the top left of your screen), click on the ‘Desktop’ tab, and select the folder with your images in from the source list. Click on the image you want, and it will appear as your desktop image. You can also select the images to rotate at a certain speed.

Whilst playing around with the oceanliving.org site I have been looking for a way to make the whole picture at the top a link back to the home page. Finally here I managed to find the answer and now clicking on the header at the top of any page on oceanliving should take you back to the start page.

On a separate note google should now find our site a little easier to as I have uploaded a sitemap to google so hopefully searches will come up with our site.

There are sites devoted to OS X icons all over the web. Icons are the little pictures like this one (a customised ‘Preview icon’) that identify programs, folders and other items on your computer. By changing the standard icons you can not only add a touch of colour and personal taste to your Mac but also can help identify folders and programs more quickly and easily.

OS X makes it very easy to change icons on most folders and applications. Simply highlight the icon you wish to use (click once on the icon), in this example Internet Explorer is highlighted, then press cmd i to get the information on that program / folder, (cmd is the key with the apple on it next to the space key).

Then click once on the small icon in the top left as shown here, and press cmd c (copy) to copy the icon.

To insert the new icon it is the same procedure, highlight the icon you wish to replace (click once on the icon), then press cmd i to get the information on that program or folder. Then click once on the small icon in the top left, and press cmd v (paste) to replace the icon.
Should you change you mind returning to the old icon is as easy as highlighting it in the Info window and pressing delete.