Like many other people out there we went and bought an Apple Time Capsule as soon as they were available for sale in early 2008. During the last several months it has become apparent that these early release Time Capsule’s seem to be suffering from a sudden death whereby they would simply turn off during use and not restart, or just wouldn’t power on upon startup.
This is a problem that affected us about a month ago, where out of the blue our trusty Time Capsule simply without any warning just packed it in. After looking endlessly over the internet it was obvious to me that there was a problem with the TC, with no apparent fix. Until now, Apple have put a formal post up on their support website which confirms that this affliction is affecting TC with serial numbers within the range: XX807XXXXXX – XX814XXXXXX. They don’t offer any real explanation as to why these units are suffering from such sudden death’s.
Their solution however is to check the serial number on your unit (this can be located in the sticker on the base of the unit) and if your unit falls within the range above, you can contact either an Apple Authorised Service Provider, Book an appointment with a Genius Bar or call the Apple Contact Centre. They will then arrange for either a replacement or repair to be carried out on your unit.
After speaking with an Apple Customer Care consultant the other day, who had no knowledge of this problem we decided to make an appointment with a Genius at the Apple Store. We went today for our session – the first real Apple Store experience we have had other than just browsing. With basically no questions we met with the Genius who looked at the serial number and said ‘yep this is within the range, and it’s not working you’re eligible to have this replaced’ so within two to three days we should have a replacement time capsule .
Over the weekend we took a little drive out to Wivenhoe Dam outside of Brisbane for a bit of a picnic that afternoon and to have a little look around. Here is a little bit of video from our adventures.
I have just stumbled across this awesome time lapse video of the space shuttle Discovery in its final stages of preparation through to its journey to the launch pad and take off. The video itself was all shot on Canon’s 5D Mk II DSLR – these camera’s are capable of some pretty awesome stuff. You can read the whole article about how and why this was made over at the Air & Space Smithsonian website, but I have embedded the video below for you to check out as I thought it was pretty interesting.
The current Apple TV has been around for some time now, with Apple putting in a seemingly small amount of effort to progress the product. However there have been rumours surfacing of late that Apple may in fact be paying more attention to it’s self proclaimed ‘hobby product’ than we all realise. The word on the tech streets suggest that the revised Apple TV may be giving the internal hard drive the boot and choosing to opt for a purely streaming style of device to be based on the iPhone OS.
Up until now the Apple TV has been operating on a revised version of the Front Row software included within the Mac OS, with the Engadget (story here)suggesting that we might be expecting to see a smaller, slimmer device which operates on the same Apple A4 chip utilised in the wildly popular iPad. The current Apple TV works by drawing content from the computers iTunes libraries that are on your home network, it copies these files to its internal hard drive for you to watch on your big screen television. Having said this it is possibly one of the easiest and most pain free ways of being able to watch DRM video content that you have purchased on the iTunes store. Because goodness knows I can’t find a more elegant or more integrated solution to get that darn DRM’ed video onto anything but a computer or iPhone.
I certainly hope that a solution like this at a supposedly cheaper price does become available from Apple, as it is something that I would be very interested in purchasing just to make watching downloaded shows a little more pleasant by being able to sit in front of the TV rather than a tiny computer screen. I can’t wait to see where this goes!
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