Wouldn’t it be nice if a new year would also mean leaving all your old troubles behind? I’d like the year 2010 to stop the trend of my stuff breaking. Which is not cool. My trusty old warhorse of a laptop, the iBook G4 suffered a hard drive failure recently. Adding to a list of breakdowns already including a hard drive, computer power supply, bluetooth keyboard and printer.

I had all important files backed up, so data loss isn’t the problem. It’s replacing the drive. While modern Apple notebooks provide easy access to the hard drive, that was not the case in the company’s old-school hardware. It’s no picnic on PowerBooks and even less for iBooks. In fact, replacing the hard drive on my iBook actually requires disassembling the entire laptop. Not kidding, no easy-access hatches here.

Oh, and it’s a 2,5″ PATA-drive. Which means the replacement is harder to find and more expensive than the modern SATA-drives. So, disassembling a laptop and a hunt for an overpriced drive: sign me up for a fun project.

For the past month I’ve been mostly stuck with playing Bioware’s Dragon Age: Origins. Not stuck literally, as I’ve progressed steadily, but due to the sheer size of the game. In-game clock is around 70 hours and no end in sight.

Granted, there’s the downloadable content adding to length, but despite that this game is huge. A bit too massive, perhaps. While I’ve enjoyed it very much, I’m actually looking forward to completing it and regaining some spare time. Although… there’s Mass Effect 2 coming up this month. Oh well…

Based on the recent amount of computer hardware failures I’m seeing there’s definitely a case of bad karma going on. About a month ago I had a hard drive biting the dust (Samsung T166, thank you very much). Then, a few weeks ago the power supply of my desktop pc died. When I installed OS X 10.6 on my Mac Mini, the optical drive sounded really funky during the whole process – making it the top candidate for the next piece of electronics that just can’t take it anymore. Oh, and did I mention the two keys that just stopped working on my Apple Wireless Keyboard?

Bad mojo keeps going warranty-wise. The Samsung drive is under warranty, but since I’ve lost the receipt Samsung refuses to have anything to do with it. You’d think that requiring a piece of paper before taking responsibility of your products is kind of silly, but maybe it’s just me.

As for the power supply, we have a jackpot. It’s not only out of warranty, but a proprietary model as well. When designing the Aria case, Antec engineers decided to fit in a non-standard PSU with shape resembling letter ‘L’ slightly. This made sure that there’s no luck finding a replacement other than Antec’s own models and unfortunately getting a replacement is both difficult and hideously expensive. Shame since Antec Aria’s a nice case. I resolved this by connecting a standard ATX-power outside the case. The setup is hideously ugly, but works as a temporary solution.

If the DVD-drive on my Mac Mini chooses to call it quits, I have another nice ordeal in front of me. While replacement drives are available, opening the Mac Mini is a major pain. There’s, of course, hope that the drive continues to function normally and just sounds like a chopper taking off.

All right, today’s lesson? Serves me right for choosing computer’s with non-standard form factors and parts.

Apple’s iPhone became available in Finland little over a year ago. The 2G-version was never officially sold here, so we jumped aboard when the next model, iPhone 3G, was released. I had watched the (generally) very positive reception the original iPhone received and since the new model had few improvements, I thought that maybe it’s worth a try. However, I decided to wait for few months so that I could see the opinions of early adopters and to make sure that the phone was actually in stock.

My few months of waiting actually ended up lasting for around 12 months. This was partly because once rumors of a new model begun floating around early this year, it was waiting time. The other reason was just lazyness on my part, have to admit that the “there’s plenty of time”- attitude I have sometimes goes to extremes.

Nevertheless, once the iPhone 3GS was announced, I finally decided to take the plunge. I stayed true to myself by not preordering, though. First Finns got their phones late June and I got mine few weeks later. Due to supply issues many here who preordered actually got their phone later than I. Perks of ordering the 16GB white model, I guess. Due to supply issues the phones are still in very limited quantity, so luck was with me.

Now that I’ve used the phone for little over a month, I can say that I’m pretty happy with my purchase. I’m not as smitten as some of those people whose life is apparently made complete by this rather nice piece of electronics, but my opinion is definitely on the positive side.

Apple held their annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) last week and had both hardware and software related announcements during the keynote. For most people, the big thing was the new iPhone-model. iPhone 3G S, alongside the accompanying version 3.0 iPhone software pretty much stole the spotlight.

As an iPod Touch -owner, I’m not commenting on the new iPhone. I have very little experience with any of the models, so there’s not much for me to talk about. Except MMS-messaging. It’s there now, so the five guys who actually use MMS can now send all the messages they want. And the other thousand guys can stop complaining about the lack of MMS and come up with another missing important feature.

Now, the 3.0 software I can comment on, since it’s for iPod Touch as well. Haven’t tested it yet, so a review’s going to have to wait. I will say that it certainly looks promising. When I reviewed software version 2.0 and version 2.1 , there were two big issues I noted. First: no copy and paste. Second: native language keyboard for Scandinavia was clumsy as hell. The new version 3.0 software fixes these both. Not bad, I say. Apple’s been busy.

iPhone-less news in WWDC included a release date for the next Mac operating system, (version 10.6, Snow Leopard) and changes in the MacBook product line. Snow Leopard’s coming in September and is a bargain for existing Leopard owners, only $29. At that price, they’ve sure got my cash.

The aluminium 13″ MacBooks received hardware updates and were re-branded to MacBook Pros. In addition to minor increases in speed, two things worth mentioning happened under the hood. First, the new MacBook Pro -models have SD-card slots. I’m actually not sure what’s the point in adding an internal SD-reader, but I guess this shuts up some of those critics who always deduct points from Mac computers because all the other laptops have those. Although they still might complain because Macs still don’t have built-in slots for Compact Flash/MemoryStick/xD/Whatever. Because USB-readers are so hard to find and are enormously huge – or something like that. Still, the slot’s there and I’ve no problem with it.

Then, the second big change. For me, at least. Firewire’s back, baby! That’s right, the new 13″ MacBook Pros have a brand new shiny FW800-port. Originally Apple removed firewire from their new models when the aluminium MacBook-line was revealed, but now it’s back, and for me this certainly is most welcome. I complained about the missing firewire last October, and now I can finally stop crying about it.

Now that think about it, Apple corrected two big issues I had with two of their products. Just for me, right? Time to dance on the table and start saving money.

I’ve used Apple’s aluminium wireless keyboard for almost a year now, and I’ve been pretty satisfied with it. It’s small, light, nice looking and great to type with. The only problem I’ve had with it is that it uses three batteries instead of four or two, so you’ll always end up with one battery you have no use for.

Apple Wireless Keyboard is pretty much the ideal keyboard, since the only problem I have with it can be countered by having a mouse that uses just one battery.

A few days ago my trusty old pal decided life’s been too peaceful, and chose to spice things up. The perfect way of doing this is by the most awkward error keyboards can have: dead keys. Two of my keys just stopped working outright. Now I was presented with a dilemma: an almost perfectly working keyboard that just happens to have two faulty keys. Now, had the entire keyboard failed, it would’ve been easy to get a new one, but since it’s just two keys, well… I ended up with choosing the route of a cheap bastard.

I decided to switch the keyboard layout, so that the broken keys could be switched elsewhere on the keyboard. My software search ended with Ukulele. Ukulele is a free software for Mac OS X that allows you to edit and change keyboard layouts. After I found the tools, it was simply a case of opening a suitable keyboard layout file and mapping the broken keys elsewhere on the keyboard. On the next login the layout file became active, and I could switch to the new layout I just created.

So, thanks to Ukulele, my keyboard is still pretty usable. I mapped two letters I’m not likely to be needing very often to the broken keys. In case I happen to need them, I can still enter them through the OSX Special Characters-menu, for example. Not very convenient, but gets the job done. Here’s hoping that the rest of the keyboard keeps on rocking, behaves and doesn’t have any more great ideas like exploding.

Backups. Something we never remember to do, but always wish we had done when the unthinkable happens. Be it a hard drive gone bad, accidentially deleted file or lost memory stick, data is lost. Not a big deal if you have a copy. If you don’t, well, though luck.

Fortunately, I’ve yet to lose data due to those things just mentioned. It’s bound to happen, though, sooner or later. When considering the many devices I own with hards drives inside them, luck’s been on my side. Nevertheless, my backup record has been less than stellar.

I had the occasional document backed up now and then, but mostly just the really important ones. Finally when Apple released OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and I saw how simple backups were with Time Machine, there was no excuse.

All was well, until I started writing my thesis. Then the data loss paranoia struck. Around then I read about online backup, and decided to give it a try. I was happy with the service I initially tried (still using it, in fact), but noticed there were a number of contenders as well. I’ve since tried to keep up with the scene a bit, and now decided to write a piece about few of the backup services I’ve had experience with.

On the first part of the series, I cover the basics, such as advantages and disadvantages of online backup. On the follow-up articles, I focus more on the backup services themselves.

Note: Just so happens, Spideroak is offering 50% discount for new users, today only. If you’re interested, sign up using my affiliate link and use code ‘recovery’ at checkout. Remember, one day discount only, so it’s deal by May 20th or no deal.

>> Online backup – introduction

Decided to change the font size on the site from “maybe a little bit too damn small” to slightly bigger. Also changed the font. Now things are a bit easier to read, helps especially in the longer articles.

I still need to fix the CSS-styles. Current style sheet is far from optimal, with overlapping and useless style definitions here and there. Will make it better, someday.