links for 2007-01-10
January 10, 2007Out of Action
September 8, 2006The PowerBook is out of action again! Bad: seems the HDD is stuffed :( Good: Apple are replacing under warranty :) Light blogging for a couple of days (is there a any other type?).
Oh no, not the Mac!
August 31, 2006After a serious ‘crash’ the PowerBook is now out of action. Looks the problem is hard drive related, and unrecoverable using the standard restore methods, including a re-install. The fear and dread of data loss subsided quickly once I remembered I did a backup less than two weeks ago. Thankfully.
But, what about getting it fixed? Wouldn’t you know it … my warranty expired just two weeks ago! I spoke with the lovely folks at Apple and they said that they will still honour it if it turns out to be hardware related! Now that’s service! So, its off to the shop with the PowerBook folks, probably for a couple of weeks due to the workload created by the battery recals. I’m lost without it already.
So, I’m eating humble pie at the moment, and copping plenty of slack from colleagues in the process.
Update: After trying to mount my hard disk as a target disc via a firewire connection to Marty’s iMac, I decided it was time to bit the bullet and send it into the shop. Donna dropped it in this morning and guess what? It was fixed before morning tea! I have absolutely no qualms about recommending the service guys at the Apple Centre in Ivanhoe, they really looked after me well! Thanks guys you’re legends.
Why I Love My Mac — Reason #0005
July 24, 2006I just got this error (no this is not a joke!) when using Windows XP under Virtual PC …
What an absolute classic … a “hard error”. I wonder: are there also easy errors?
Address Book Export Saga
May 26, 2006I momentarily lost the contents of my address book today, and certain individuals (who shall remain nameless) used the opportunity to gloat about my misfortune, and to chalk one up for PCs/Windoze. Fortunately–just like a football player who’s team is winning the game and receives some ’stick’ from the opposition–all I have to do is “point to the scoreboard“. I’m well ahead on that score!
Anyway:I was trying to export my contacts to a .csv file and–much to my chagrin–discovered that Address Book (Version 4.0.3) can only export vCards. Problem is you can’t import vCard data format into Excel (or Spreadsheet in OpenOffice).
So, with the power of google at my fingertips, off I went in search of a utility. Sure enough, I found one via the Apple website. It didn’t have all the features I wanted, but it looked like it would do the export. Well, export it did–all of my contacts. It did not copy them out, it moved them out! Shit. And without knowing this, I trashed the export file after I discovered that the format was not particularly useful. Double shit.
Thankfully, my mobile phone proved to be my saving grace. I regularly sync the laptop with the phone and was able to use the phone’s ’send all contacts’ feature to retrieve the data. Back to normal. I also have a backup procedure in place, which was the non-preferred option as the data was probably a little older. This serves as a reminder to make sure that it is up-to-date.
Oh, and in the process, I did manage to find a nice little utility that does exactly what I want it to … AddressBookExporter-2.1.2. I recommend that you check it out for yourself if you need to export your data in the more useful text format.
