Anthony Martin’s Weblog

Benjamin loves iPhone/iPod touch.  No, I don't think Apple had autistics in mind when they designed them.  But that's just it.  Apple designed it so intuitively, practically anyone can fiddle with it and figure it out without instruction.

One morning, after my shower, I found him in his room, playing with his mom's iPod touch.  He swiped it out of our room, turned it on, unlocked it, navigated through the home screen, found his favorite applications, and launched it (currently either Banner and Peanut Butter Jelly Time).  He probably did this multiple times on this morning because he likes the transition between the home screen and the app when it's launched.  But we still have to supervise him.  It might actually make sense to set up a pass key to discourage him from swiping it.  Then again, that might backfire.

Here he is using my iPhone:



So far, there are only two things I have to really watch him on.  First, he still likes to put things in his mouth, especially objects he really likes.  This hasn't happened yet, that I'm aware of.  Second, he tends to accidentally get the home screen into "uninstall/move" mode.  The main reason this happens is because sometimes he doesn't realize his other fingers are touching the icons.  Touching the icons on the home screen for more than a couple seconds causes it to switch into this mode.  When this happens, all the icons shake and non-Apple apps can be removed by tapping the X.  He hasn't managed to uninstall anything yet.

There is a feature in the Settings that allows Restrictions on various features.  It'd be nice if "uninstall" was one of the listed restrictions, but it's not as of OS version 2.2.1.

One neat application for iPhone is Google Voice Search.  So today, I tried the new Earthquake results in Google.  I'm sure they'll fix it soon, but witness a rare Google FAIL!

This is geotag003.  The Quicktime VR didn't stitch too good.  But other than that ... enjoy!

(download)

There is already a lot out there about ICE.  Snopes has an article.  Even Benjamin's school talks about it.  If you're not aware of what it is, in a nut shell, ICE stands for "In Case of Emergency."  It is supposed to manifest as an address book entry in your mobile phone.  I think there are many ways to do it, but this is how I do it on my iPhone:

1. Create a new address book entry with the Company Name of: ICE
2. Add spouse's phone number followed by a hash (#).
3. Add home phone number followed by a hash (#).
4. Add work phone number followed by a hash (#).
5. Add own mobile number followed by a hash (#).
6. Add mother's mobile number followed by a hash (#).

I use the custom label feature of iPhone rather than leave each entry labeled as "other" or whatever the default is.  I am emphasizing the hash (#) for a reason.  If you do not have a hash at the end, likely your phone will match incoming calls to the ICE entry, which is a pain.  I would rather see my wife's name and photo show on the screen when she calls, not just "ICE."  In the unlikely even a first responder has to look over your address book, he or she will likely not be confused by the hash.  So it's the best of both worlds.  Anyway, that's my only alteration to the instructions other than the reason I have my own mobile number listed in my ICE entry is just in case my phone is involved by I am not.  If that happens, I can check my messages and find out what's going on.  Anyway, I hope that helps.  Enjoy.

This week I got the family desktop configured to use a RAID array (mirrored) for primary storage.  So now it's booting, mirrored, and I feel better knowing the data is safe.  The array is built from two Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200.10 and I have a backup drive offline, waiting in its static bag in case one fails.  They are 250 GB each to match the original size in order to avoid any mirroring issues and because they were inexpensive.

After setting it up, I did a disk verify on both the old and new volumes to see which one was faster.  The old volume could be verified in about 10 minutes.  The new one took almost 2 minutes.  So I'm very happy with that boost.

I didn't need any special software to do this.  All I used were the utilities and features supplied in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.  I've seen several approaches, some more risky than others.  Some suggest third party software to accomplish what Leopard can already do.  So I recommend the following procedure:

1. Install the new drive.
2. Boot and begin in the Disk Utility to erase the new drive, calling it "New Macintosh HD".
   • Quit Disk Utility and issue a terminal command:
   • diskutil enableRAID mirror /Volumes/New\ Macintosh\ HD
3. Reopen the Disk Utility, click on the new drive, and use the Restore option to copy the boot disk onto "New Macintosh HD".
   • You will need to pay attention because the new drive has two entries in the list of volumes; slice name and RAID group name.  You want to ignore the slice.
   • In the Restore tab of the new drive, drag the old volume to the first field and the new volume to the second field.  This will cause the first field to become "/" and the second field to become "New Macintosh HD" with an icon.
4. When the copy is complete, selected "New Macintosh HD" as the boot disk in System Preferences and reboot.
5. Now verify the old drive to make sure there were no errors.  I recommend doing this after booting on the new drive because the verify can now be more thorough due to the fact that the system didn't boot to it.  If it's all clear, proceed.  If not, you're on your own.  You probably just need to do a repair and this procedure start over.  Make sure you boot back to the old drive after the repair.
6. Shut down and remove the old drive and replace it with another identical drive.
   • Replacing it is optional, but the old drive is now a backup of the system.  In my case, I wanted both drives to be identical for performance reasons.
   • Boot into the one-disk (degraded) RAID group and use the Disk Utility to drag the new disk into the RAID group.  This erased the new disk and start the mirror "repair".  This may take many hours to complete.
   • You need to pay attention because the dialog window in the Disk Utility can be behind the main Disk Utility window.  If you lose it, click Window, then Disk Utility Progress.  If it stops, close the Disk Utility and open it up again.  If you get bored, open the Activity Monitor and watch the Disk Activity or go have a beer (preferably both).

This is only one of many possible solutions.  Using this as the most basic solution is great because it guards against failure and is very low maintenance once it's set up and it doesn't cost as much.  Apple's Time Machine is still my favorite solution, but it's pretty expensive to do it right .

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