When the iPhone stops syncing with the Mac

Just want to document this for Google to pick it up, just in case somebody else has a similar issue. The issue was that my iPhone stopped syncing. There was a variety of errors: timeouts, cannot read disk, hanging forever while syncing or just not recognizing the iPhone after connecting. I tried everything - restoring, reinstalling iTunes, swapping cables, but nothing helped. More mysterious, my iPod synced without problems.

The key to the solution was in the Mac OS X logs: the message

May 13 19:28:54 Jamaica usbmuxd[6182]: MuxInterfacev1Receive Dropping packet. Received 17408, expected 32764 bytes

May 13 19:28:54 Jamaica com.apple.usbmuxd[6182]: usbmuxd[6182]: MuxInterfacev1Receive Dropping packet. Received 17408, expected 32764 bytes

This somehow hinted an USB problem and after I disconnected a SanDisk ImageMate 12 in 1 Card reader the problem was solved.

This is by the way one of those situation where Apple's user friendliness gets into the way of solving an actual problem. None of the error messages displayed in iTunes hinted that there's an issue with USB. Good that's Mac OS X is UNIX and there's always a log to look at.

Back Home in NYC

Back from one of our short trips to Germany, we learned or confirmed three things:

First, business class is the way to fly, if you don't have to pay the full price yourself, that is (thanks again, Christian!). It's not only the amenities, such as a much more comfortable seat, where you can actually sleep, but also that you're not being treated like cattle. Here you can still find something of the old glory of travel.

Second, business class or not, airlines loose, or better mislay your baggage and don't care too much. We waited three days for our suitcase to be delivered, right in time for having fresh clothes on the flight back. Next time we'll be better prepared, with bigger hand luggage and multiple pieces, which hopefully don't get all lost at once.

Third, as nice as it is to visit family and friends, we're always looking forward to get back home to New York. People have different preferences, but we like this city very much, for it's dynamic and its diversity and even for its insane weather.

This is not triple easy!

I've been looking for this a long time: a mobile device that I can carry with me all the time and that I can use to write. E-mails, blogs, stories, screenplays, notes, which means significant amounts of text. A laptop would be ideal, but is too heavy to carry around, just in case. A smart phone is too small to write more than a few lines in an e-mail. So I want something in between.

On New Years Day I stumbled over the Asus Eee PC, the "Surf" version, that is. This is a $299 ultra-portable that runs some version of Linux. It has almost no storage (some 300 MBytes are free), so it's more or less meant as a dumb Internet terminal. It's close to useless in that capacity, however: the WiFi client is ridiculous, forcing you to enter the WPA key every time it connects. It comes with Firefox, Skype and some other Internet apps, but the 7" screen doesn't make them fun to use. Firefox, for example, wastes almost half of the screen real estate with it's various tool and status bars. For a new class of device you need a new class of software - Asus is doing it on the cheap - literally - and the result sucks.

It can be a quite useful device nonetheless. It has the classic laptop form factor, with a real keyboard, a little smaller of course, but with a right look & feel. And I'm strongly convinced that ultra portable should have either a real keyboard or none at all. Nobody so far has figured how to do the latter right (guess we need to wait for Apple on this), so the Eee's conventional keyboard is the way to go. It also comes with OpenOffice installed, which contains a pro-grade word processor. Again, OpenOffice has its issues to fit in that small frame, but all in all it's usable for serious writing.

But how do I keep it in sync with my laptop? In theory, the Eee should connect to shared network drives, but while trying that I quickly ended up tweaking the Samba configuration files. Now I do know a thing about Linux configuration or two, but this isn't worth the effort. Fortunately there's an easier way: I use a SD card as primary storage on the Eee. With the help of ChronoSync on my MacBook it automatically syncs whenever I put it into the card reader. Sweet.

Remains the battery life, which is, as always, a bitter disappointment. The Eee gives you some 3 hours uptime, which is close to ridiculous, but apparently this is all you can get these days. My commute is around an hour each way, so I can live with that for now.

All in all I prefer the Eee much over other ultra portables, which I find far too expensive and lacking a real keyboard. But there's still an opportunity out there for the perfect mobile device that fits functionally a smartphone and a laptop.

Apple TV Take 2

I've always thought Apple TV is a great idea, simply because I like listening to music and watching movies in the living room, rather than on my PC. But Apple TV had its flaws and everybody was waiting for the next update (or for its discontinuation). Well, finally it happened and Apple released a free update, which includes tons of new and improved functionality.

The big one is access to the iTunes store, including movie rentals, sometimes even in HD. That's certainly a smart move - however you need a really fast Internet connection for making HD downloads work: we tried it two times and eventually gave up waiting for the data trickling down the net.

But it's the smaller improvements I like the most:

• Apple TV acts now as a wireless speaker from iTunes. This very elegantly allows to "remote control" an Apple TV (one item on my first wish list). Also on our last party we could play the same music in both rooms, which is kind of cool.
• The distinction between synced and streamed content has finally been dropped. This was pretty annoying, because for accessing the full media library one needed to go through several menu items to switch between the local and the remote library. This happens now automatically and you can even turn the iTunes sync settings to "automatic", which copies supposedly the latest media to the Apple TV hard disk.
• Originally we bought Apple TV mostly for watching photos on the big screen. However this was only slightly less cumbersome than pulling a projector out of the cabinet and erecting a screen: if the photos were on a different machine than the one Apple TV synced with, you needed to copy them explicitly over, ideally reducing their size for saving disk space. The new Apple TV finally streams photos from Flickr, ,mac , iPhoto or Aperture from any computer which is connected to Apple TV.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the software update and my wish list is more or less reduced to one item: streaming music from Internet radio stations. Can we please get this?

Quicken Online: Back to Beta

I was really looking forward to Quicken online, but the disappointment grows: first it's buggy like hell (Intuit acknowledged this and extended the trial period) and second it's so limited in features that I don't really know what it's for.

Officially it's labeled as an entry level product for people who have basic needs in financial management. Well, I can't imagine how anybody gets something useful out of this product. In my opinion the most basic need is to monitor transactions, categorize your spending and generate reports about where your money went. 

However Quicken Online is actually unable to help you with that:

• You cannot monitor your transactions, because QO will categorize them automatically, which may be, naturally, incorrect. After it's categorized nothing tells it apart from any transactions which have been reviewed. So, for example, if QO feels that it recognizes a fraudulent charge on a credit card, it will literally hide it among the other transactions. 
• You cannot categorize spending, because there's no split feature. I don't know anybody at Intuit thought they can get around this. Do they expect that we sort our products at the check out an pay each category separately.
• There are reports that show how much you spend in each category, but you cannot download them or print them.

QO is a nicely done web application, but the current feature set is by far not sufficient for any kind of financial planning. 

Still Missing the Sync

Apple's new product announcements are always fun to watch, because you never know what is going to happen. Steve Job's keynote on Tuesday was especially fun, because two new products were actually free software updates and the MacBook Air seems to be such a niche product that it doesn't send me to re-calculate my budget.

Still I think, something is curiously missing in Apple's shiny digital world and the MacBook Air highlights it, given that for most people it will be an addition to their main desktop computer: how do you get the data from your main Mac to your laptop. Of course you can copy files, but this does only work for document files, for example Word files. It does not work for the “library” style repositories that the iLife applications use. For example iTunes, which just got a revamp to support rental movies. Yes, you can sync the movies to watch them on your Mac, your Apple TV and your tiny iPod or iPhone screens. But you can't take it on the road on your laptop and it's 13” or more screen. Same goes for photos, where you have to maintain a separate repository on each computer.

So, Apple, you solved the syncing of persona data between computers pretty elegantly (however pricey) with .Mac. Can we now please have an universal sync that keeps certain files, including the data of iTunes, iLife applications and pro apps like Aperture available on our laptops, while we are on the road?  

Quicken Online - First Impressions

As a long time power user of personal finance software, I've been waiting a long time for a web-bases solution. With the availability of the new "Web 2.0" technologies, there's just no need anymore for installing a clunky local application on a single machine. Especially since there's no really satisfying personal finance program available for the Mac. Now, since Jan 8th, the wait has an end: Intuit released its Quicken Online site and I registered on the very first day (after going through "site unavailable" messages for a couple of days).

Now I was prepared to live with reduced functionality, but Quicken Online covers only a tiny little part of what I'm used to. It seems that most of the work for the initial release went into the connectivity to the banks, which is truly impressive: the list of supported banks (in the U.S.) is endless and I could register all my (non-investment) accounts within minutes. QO would then download 90 days of transactions and try to categorize them automatically, which works pretty well. After that QO would refresh the accounts automatically in the background on a daily basis, so you would look always at a current balance.

Add some simple graphs and reports, a way to add future transactions and text message or e-mail bill reminders based on automatically recognized recurring transactions and you have pretty much the entire app. That's a decent starting point, but obviously still a long way to go.

Here's what I miss the most:

• Splitting transactions. I can't think of a reason how they could miss this. Officially this decision was made, because they wanted to assign transaction automatically, but that doesn't really make sense. Reality is, that there are transaction that fall into multiple categories and for the purpose of budgeting and controlling your expenses you have to split them accordingly.
• Security. I appreciate all measures to keep my personal data private, but logging in could be a little more convenient. At least the login page should allow the browser to fill in user name and password automatically.
• Accounts that are not backed by a bank. Common wisdom would say that they are much easier to implement than bank-backed accounts. So why are they missing, preventing me e.g. from tracking international accounts.
• Transfers. You cannot transfer money from one account to another, for example to pay a credit card bill. You have to enter the transaction two times, which is silly.

There's missing more of course: a budget function (I haven't seen a good one in any software, so I don't care too much), more reports, more graphs, import/export function and support for investment accounts. 

So let's see where this one is going. Supposedly there's a lot of interest, so hopefully Intuit throws some resources at Quicken Online and implements more features quickly.