Muskoka Mac User Group

Ok, that’s getting a little old for those of us living here in Muskoka this week…..

If you’d like a little internet injected sunshine – or just some added envy to your day – David Harris has started making entries on his Pinedog blog again. He, his wife and pets are off to Mexico and sharing the adventure on-line.

Boy I wish I could take half as good a picture as he does…

Some time I really wish Apple would wake up and smell the coffee. They are getting slammed over and over again because they just refuse to say anything at all….

Case in point – Apple’s new Time Capsule started shipping this week. Does it get them positive press? Nope – instead everybody (myself included!) is complaining about the fact that they’ve never even bothered to explain why Time Capsule is the only way you can do wireless backups, or backups to anything that isn’t another Mac.

I mean, there’s only two possible reasons:

1. Either it’s a technical problem they haven’t fixed
2. They won’t allow it because they want to sell more Time Capsules

My personal guess here is that there are technical issues, and by releasing Time Capsule they were hoping nobody would notice that Time Machine is broken. Comments from drive vendors and individuals seem to indicate that Time Capsule assumes disk writes work, and has no facility for handling a ’sorry – please try again’ message from a network share. They cobbled up a fix – but it only works if the network share is running OSX or is a Time Capsule.

The result however is that most people are assuming that there is no problem – after all, Time Capsule is just an Airport with a drive attached to it – so Apple is deliberately making sure that you have to use all Apple gear to use Time Machine (or an expensive NAS system with iSCSI)
And that gets people upset. Deliberately disabling something to promote sales of another product is legal, but leaves a bad taste in people’s mouthes. The PC hardware guys have always known they have to interoperate if they want to succeed. Apple needs to understand that, or ‘fess up to their software shortcomings…. Not saying anything is worse than either of those.

Update – Just one more link to show it’s not just me whining….. Note he thinks there will be a firmware update for the Airport once Time Capsule ships. Well, it’s shipping now….

This is kinda neat – and I know many of you Mac people have a graphic arts streak, so I figured you might be interested in the evolution of tech company logos

Worth a quick look.

Some of you might have seen Tom’s picture in the paper last week discussing a hydro ’surge’ that ran through his neighbourhood. He’ll be at the meeting to give us all the gory details.

I thought I could demo ‘Skitch’ a handy little snapshot/sketch/illustration/online presentation tool that’s currently in beta.

Meg is a grandma again (Congratulations guys!) so believe it or not, she’s off to Saskatoon! (Remember the Goodyear commercial where the lead guy ends up going to Medicine Hat in January? Meg’s pretty much doing the same Craig will be around to pester in her place.

There’s other things we can talk about, but I don’t want to dominate the schedule – so fire your ideas up here so we’ve got some warning what you want to discuss!

See you there – Don’t forget your chair!

Yeah, it was probably just Bugs Bunny that started it, but for everyone that ever wanted to dig a hole to China, it turns out you’d have to start in Argentina… Oh, ok, it’s not really accounting for north and south, but it’s still a fun thing to play with.

Ever had to point your satellite dish?

Want to figure out where your airline flight is right now?

All from this list of 100 things to do with Google Map Mashups. Take a look and tell us what your favourites are!