Apple’s iLife 09 was recently released on January 27th, 2009. I was very excited about 2 of the new iPhoto 09 features- Faces and Places. After starting iPhoto 09 for the first time, it scans through all your photos looking for faces. The scan can take quite a while depending on how may photos you have. I have already started selecting faces in my library and hopefully it will replace most of the key-wording/taging I am currently doing for people in my library.

My main iPhoto library is on my iMac. That is were I typically dump all my photos (unless I am traveling), and then I copy them to my MacBook Pro and my Wife’s MacBook. The Geotagged photos (and keywords) will not copy over when you connect to shared photos from inside iPhoto. To keep the geotagged data and keywords, you have to export your photos, then import them into your other libraries. Use the Export option under the File Menu in iPhoto. Here are the export settings to keep your photo data:



Now when you import to another iPhoto Library, you will have your geotagged data and keywords. Get your copy of iLife 09.

More info on Geotaging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geotagging

Here is a post about eBooks coming to the iTunes store: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/11/e-books-have-a.html



There are already some books in the App Store for reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch. A few months ago we had an Apple Engineer come to my University to talk about Apple products and solutions. He told us that Apple was in talks with the major publishers about bring text books to iTunes. There is already the iTunes University (iTunes link) - podcasts from all kinds of Universities free of charge. Many of them are the audio and/or video of classes you can take at that particular University. iTunes also has a “private” University area that only University users can access for even more content that only relates to current students/staff/faculty. It was really neat to hear about all the options although my University has yet to set up anything.

iTunes is already my first stop for music, podcasts, movies, and TV shows. I would love to be able to buy eBooks through it also, although the majority of my book reading is via Audible (audible.com). As I don’t have a lot of time to sit and read and I don’t consider myself a fast reader, I prefer to listen to audiobooks (I love the dramatizations). If you would like a referral for a free audiobook, use the contact page to ask for one.

Backup, Backup, Backup

Besides security updates, backups are probably the most important thing you can do to protect yourself. Not only are backups critical, but the more backups the better. I wanted to lay out my own personal backup plan to help you create your own strategy according to your needs.




Right now I have a MacBook Pro and my wife has a MacBook. I have an 1 TB Apple Time Capsule that both our laptops backup to via Time Machine each hour (when they are powered on). Time Machine backups are kept until the space on the Time Capsule runs out. We currently have a few months worth of backups with plenty of space left. I really like the time machine as it makes backups and restores very easy. I have even used it to do a full restore on a laptop that would not seem to boot correctly. All you have to do is boot to the Leopard Install DVD, then there is a choice in the menu to restore from Time Machine.

Store Link via Amazon



My 2nd major backup for both laptops is SuperDuper, which is a full clone copy of your computer to an external hard drive. The nice thing about a full clone is that it is also bootable if the internal hard drive has issues or dies. I do a SuperDuper back on both our laptops about 1-2 times a week. It also offers the fastest restore time as you can boot to the SuperDuper backup, then restore back to your internal hard drive. To boot to the SuperDuper backup, power off your computer, attach the USB or Firewire external drive, then turn on your computer while holding down the “option” key. That will show a boot menu of the internal and external drives.

There is a free version that will do a full clone copy every time you use it so it can take a couple hours depending on how much data you have. The paid version does a full backup the first time, then only differentials (or what has changed) for the others. The later saves a lot of time and is fairly cheap, which is what I use.




Mozy is a 3rd backup I do for both laptops, like a few other services, it is an online backup. When you sign up for the free account, you will get 2 GB of online storage for free. It has a nice little client that allows you to choose what you would like to backup. 2GB should be enough for most people’s documents but not enough for their music and videos. They also have a paid plan of around $5/month for unlimited storage. That is a good deal if you need it.

Right now, you can get an extra 512MB for the free plan with this referral code: http://mozy.com/?ref=CXRE56




Lastly, my 4th backup, is mobileme (formerly .mac). I don’t have the mobileme family plan, so I only use it on my primary laptop. It is also an online backup (and more) that give you 20 GB or storage. You can buy more if you need it. It costs $99/year for storage, a .me email address, calendar and contacts syncing, web space, and photo gallery. I have a daily scheduled job to backup my important data.

Store Link via Amazon


As you can tell, I am pretty keen on backups. I always want to be able to restore if needed and to keep a copy of my critical files off-site. It may look a little excessive at first, but after the setup, it is easy to maintain. The first time you lose some important files (financial, photos, etc) you will get at least some sort of backups going. What is your approach to backups?

I have been using Office 2008 for Macand the Previous Entourage 2004 to connect to our Exchange server a work. The program itself has been pretty good. It allows you to do about 90-95% of what you can do in Outlook on the PC. You can do all of outlook’s normal stuff - Email, Contacts, Calendar/Scheduling, set your Out-Of-Office notifications, etc. Entourage will also allow you to open other user’s folders given you have the correct permissions. It even has a built in project area which I have used from time to time to keep everything together under each project (emails, calendar entries, notes, files, etc).

One of the limitations has to do with scheduling a resource. If the resource (such as a conference room) is set to auto-accept invitations, it will not auto-accept the meeting from Entourage. It just sits in the resource’s inbox waiting to be approved.

On October 14th, 2008, Microsoft released Entourage update 12.1.3. This broke one major things: scheduling meetings with other people or resources. If you schedule a meeting and send the request, you get an error message and it just sits in your outbox. Microsoft is supposed to be working on the issue and will hopefully release a fix soon. Here is a newsgroup with more information.

In some cases, a workaround is to send the invitation, then move it from the outbox to your drafts folder. Then open the item in your drafts folder and hit send again. I have not tried this yet - I have actually started playing around with the Apple Mail and iCal combination since this happened. I will write about that in another post after I have more time to play with it.

Overall, Entourage 2008 works pretty well. It connects to OWA and via https enables you to connect from anywhere.

Update: Looks like Microsoft release a patch to fix this in Office 12.1.4