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.

For more information on this issue head over to Apple’s support website http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3351

Update: 18 July

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 .

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!

]]> http://lukeandmelissah.com/rumours-of-a-new-apple-tv-to-be-a-streaming-star/feed 0 http://lukeandmelissah.com/facebook-and-your-privacy http://lukeandmelissah.com/facebook-and-your-privacy#comments Thu, 13 May 2010 10:07:03 +0000 Luke http://lukeandmelissah.com/?p=470 Facebook have been tinkering with their privacy settings on their wildly popular social network within the last couple of weeks, and out of these changes it got me thinking a little about how much has changed on this site since its early days.

After a curious look at my privacy settings page under my account today, I made the decision that it looked way to hard and time consuming to even think about starting to understand all of that! Oh and by the way you need to do yourself a favour and check it out just to see what I am talking about. Now I consider myself pretty good when it comes to understanding things like that but geez Facebook, that page has more options than a prestige car, you guys really need to simplify that for us mere mortals a little bit. I hate to think just how many people out there are uploading personal information day to day and filling their profiles with data without realising just how many third parties have access to this stuff.

If you are interested in finding out a little more about just how much Facebooks privacy has changed since it began you might like to wander on over to a blog by Matt McKeon, the post called ‘The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook‘. There is an excellent graphical representation of just how things have changed as you can see a little bit of in the image below.

And if you are into the real nitty gritty details of the changes you may like to mosey on over to the Facebook Privacy Policy blog. Where they have all the juicy details about just what they have changed.

It would seem plausible that this would be the case as in the past Apple have been one of the first computer companies to utilise Intel’s most modern processor chips, the latest of which in the range include the Core i5 & i7. The i7 chip has been offered in specific Apple desktop models for some time now. Therefore it would seem only sensible that they work their way into the laptop’s at one time or another.

Another interesting piece of information which also suggests that there might be a revision or update on it’s way is the MacRumours Buying Guide. MacRumours use historical information about previous release dates and the time in-between different releases and upgrades to help suggest when a product line is getting long in the tooth. Turns out it is a very handy tool if you are considering purchasing a new Apple product, jump on and have a look too see if the product you are looking for is nearing the end of its cycle you may like to hold off on that purchase just a little while. At this point in time it is interesting to note that this guide is suggesting that the product lines including the Macbook Pro, Macbook Air and Mac Pro are all recommending ‘Don’t Buy – Updates Soon’.

So this is when it all starts to get a little exciting, my guess is that we probably won’t see any major design changes to the actual products but bring on some modern processors and revisions to perhaps the graphics cards and hard drives. Only time will tell.

Last year when Apple released the iPhone 3.0 software update, it gave the ability for integration between external devices and applications running on the phone. To showcase this TomTom was featured in the Keynote presentation where they announced not only their turn-by-turn navigation app, but the windscreen mount to securely hold your phone in the car.

So no, this isn’t some kind of crazy just released news, but it had taken some time for the cradle to become available in the Australian market. My thoughts prompting me to write a post however were more around what I feel is the almost obscene price that TomTom are looking to charge for this application & mount.

The price for the application to run on your phone is somewhere in the vicinity of $99, now that is pricey in application standards for the iPhone. Infact this app is one of the highest grossing apps currently in the store – so some people must be buying it. In me swallowing the thought of spending this amount on an application I thought about it and, yes this is probably a worthwhile price to pay considering the costs that would go into developing and providing the service. Then comes the window mount…

The window mount allows you to dock your iPhone on your windscreen, charge your phone, call handsfree, enhance the GPS performance of you phone, and enhances the turn by turn voice instructions. All for the wonderful price of $129.00. My question here then is, with the increased popularity of portable GPS systems they have severely come down in price. What would compel a customer to spend as much on an application and a windscreen mount when you can spend the same amount or perhaps a little more and have a dedicated device which is centred around providing you with turn by turn directions.

The charging of your phone is certainly convenient, hands free calling is also great, however for this a large number of GPS systems incorporate Bluetooth to this this now anyway, or your car may have the function built in. As or the enhanced GPS function, well wouldn’t you get the best performance from a dedicated GPS??

Admittedly it certainly has it’s merits as well, given that if you don’t already own a GPS you can probably get away with a slightly cheaper option in buying the TomTom for your iPhone. You do get the great touch screen on the iPhone which completely beats all of the other touch screens on GPS devices I have used, and it’s one less device to worry about.

So I can see that it certainly has its pro’s and cons, but I don’t see this as something that I would run out and get. Especially given that we already own a dedicated GPS, however when the time comes that the current unit needs replacing, this could be a viable option.

This is a nice and handy little tool so we don’t have to rely on navigating to other URL shortening services like bit.ly or tinyurl. It is only a minor thing I know but if it means cutting out the need to have to navigate to other websites that I don’t need to go to then bring it on!

You will notice when you are creating or editing a post that under where you put the title of the post there is the permalink underneath. Next to the permalink you have the option to edit it, or now ‘Get Shortlink’  as you can see in the screen shot below.

When you click on this it pops up a little window with your shortened URL to copy and paste as you like. For example the shortlink for this post here would look like this: http://wp.me/pDhmW-7p now that certainly beats the alternative that is this: http://lukeandmelissah.com/wordpress-2-9-gets-url-shortening. Especially when it comes to tweets where you are character limited.

Buzz sounds awfully promising in what it intends to deliver, in that it is intended to be a central online place that brings together all aspects of things that you want to share with others whether its just your family or the whole world. If you want to share pictures – Buzz links up with your Flickr or Picasa web albums to ingeniously show off your photos. Same idea for videos from your YouTube account, or tweets you publish from your Twitter account.

Buzz allows you to link up all of these aspects of your social networking life and share them. I guess what it intends to do is to give a central location so that there is no need for you to post to twitter, do the usual copy and paste and re-post it for your other friends on facebook who don’t use twitter. While doing this is does away with the need for users to navigate away from Buzz as it shows videos and pictures as part of the timeline that you’re viewing.

There are a few detractors here, as with any social network it relies heavily on you’re friends also being a part of the same online community. If you have a lot of friends using Gmail already or that you communicate with through Google Talk etc you will probably find that Buzz works really well for you. However if you – like me – have become so centralised around Facebook I’m seeing may not work as well for me. Where is the fun of posting and putting content into a social network that never gets any attention from the people I want to see it.

Apart from this as one drawback I see, I have had nothing but trouble trying to get this to connect to my different sites. It just seems to lock up and freeze all the time. To add to this it just doesn’t seem to come across as being polished or elegant to use. This may just be a part of me needing to get connected with more people on the service, or it could also be that I’m so used to using Facebook now that I need to re-train my brain.

So it may just be me but it seems to be a little under-ripe, and perhaps in time it will mature and become more of a useful service for me. However, while I’m willing to sign up and give it a go I just don’t know whether it is going to be a game changer for me. If you have any suggestions for getting more out of Buzz or have opinions one way or the other about the service feel free to leave a comment and let us all know what you think.

It will be the third anniversary of the iPhone since the 1st Gen (America Only) was released in 2007, and two years since the worldwide release of the 3G iPhone. To me this means one thing! All of the customers – worldwide – who purchased the 3G and in doing so signed up for a 24 month contract, are coming up to the expiry of their contract. What this means is that Apple will need to have something on offer to all of these customers with expiring contracts otherwise they will see people jumping ship to other recently released iPhone competitors.

Hardware wants…

I would love to see a front facing camera in the iPhone. I think that this is something that has been lacking since the introduction of the device. Just look at that awesome large screen, this is a perfect device for video calling either over a cellular network call or via a VOIP service like Skype.

A revised design. While the style of the iPhone is now almost iconic. The look of the phone itself has almost (in my opinion) started to date a little in comparison to some of the other smart-phones that have been released lately. I know that they have already done the phone with the metal back on it. But wouldn’t it be really nice to see an iPhone that utilised the unibody aluminium design like in the Macbook Pro’s – even though I know they ditched the old aluminium design for signal quality issues, but I can still want it right??

I would expect to see a newer, higher resolution screen on the device also. Technology has come a long way since the phone was originally released, and I can only imagine it would be inevitable for a new version of the phone to possess a better screen.

It would also be nice to see a refinement in the quality of the few buttons that they use on the device. To me the side buttons feel a little cheap, and not only that, I know of cases where both the flip switch between normal and silent modes has gone bung as well as where the ‘home’ key gets used so much that it also goes into a state of non-responsivness.

Software wants…

As far as software goes, the first thing on my list here is a big cry out to Apple. Please, please, please fix the damn Mail app. This program is so clunky and painful to use if you have any more than one email account. The way it expects you to have a separate inbox for each and every mail account is certainly not elegant, nor is the four of five finger taps it takes to get between two accounts. They need to simplify this and give you the ability to have one main inbox like they do in the Mail app for the Mac.

Ringtones are no problem on the iPhone, its simply a matter of either forking over a dollar or two and buying the ability to make one through the iTunes store. Or if you have a few more moments spare you can make you own either through Garageband for Macs, or through iTunes for PC. However I really think that it is time they opened up the ability to either buy additional SMS & Alarm alerts, or to give the ability to make them like it is done with ringtones.

One of the last things that I would love to see added to the software capabilities of the iPhone is the ability to have badges for apps like Mail, Messages, Phone appear on the ‘unlock’ screen after you have just woken your phone up so you don’t have to physically unlock you’re phone just to see whether you have new mail or have missed a call.

These are just a few of the things that I would love to see in the next revision of the phone and its software. Its a matter of a few months yet before we will even know. I’m just wishing and hoping *fingers crossed*