Eureka, a few days after I returned home, a brand new iPad (original) arrived at my office. I let it sit for a couple of weeks without opening it. I couldn’t help but notice that a few of my most used apps (Omnifocus for iPad, OmniGraffle, iAnnotate) were kinda slow on my original iPad. After thinking about it a while, I sold it (400 deer!) and applied that to a new one. Oh, yeah, I needed the HDMI adapter. Gotta have a cool leather cover. I like having a dock. Gotta have 3G as I have an unlimited 3G plan I don’t want to give up. Need 32 gig as I always have 8 or 9 gig free, but not 16 gig. At least I can reuse my existing camera connection. So….$926.62 later, new ipad 2 was ordered. When am I gonna learn to buy Apple stock instead?

A day later, I had a bit of buyer’s remorse when I thought about Rhonda’s MacBook Air. Curse Apple. As I logged on to cancel the order, I saw they had already shipped all the peripherals. Also, the iPad 2 wasn’t quite as close in price to the Air as I thought. I decided to roll with the flow and accept delivery of the iPad 2.

Switching over to the new iPad was way easier than I anticipated. Here’s a hint for all the kiddies out there…encrypt your backups for your iPhone or iPad. If you do, your passwords are backed up and will be transferred to your new device. If you don’t, you will have to come up with random wireless passwords you have long since forgotten. I backed up the vintage model with encryption enabled, then restored to the new shinier, faster, more sudsy iPad 2. However, all my carefully arranged icons (I have a lot of apps) were in random order. Remembering a tip I read somewhere, I synced once again and all was back to normal, except that FaceTime and PhotoBooth pushed the last two apps on my home screen to screen 2, all by themselves. That’s kinda pushy….but easy to fix.

I assumed that switching my 3G plan could not possibly be as easy since AT&T would be involved. Incorrect. When I Googled the issue, some people, including MacWorld, recommended moving the SIM card from the old iPad to the new one. Other sites suggested I could just log into my plan from the new iPad and enter two numbers that are found in the Settings app under General, About. I took a picture of the IMEI and ICCID numbers using my iPhone, then entered those numbers where required after logging onto my AT&T account on the new iPad 2 (Settings app, then choose Cellular Data). Nothing happened at first. I turned off both iPads, then turned both on. The old one had no service and the new one picked up right in the middle of the billing cycle of the old one.

Ain’t life grand!

The Walgreens App…good for what ails you.

Just tested…Marsedit still works.

I started the system using a Linksys WRT54G like 90% of the world. I’ve since retired the Linksys and substituted an Apple Time Capsule with a 500 gig hard drive to get 802.11n wireless speeds and for Time Machine backups. It works well, and I’m actually (mis?)using it as a file server. AS it turned out, I’m not crazy about using Apple’s Time Machine backup program to back up every durn thang I do as I use my brain instead to figure out what to back up. I also like my backups to be off-site, so I ended up with a spare 1/2 terabyte in the Apple Time Capsule to use to store files.

We currently have music streamed to living room, back porch (sorry, neighbors, and yes, I realize music carries over water), master bedroom, master bathroom, and upstairs to the Apple TV. To stream music from iTunes, I just choose from the menu:

Next in the series….what music do we stream? Hint-XM radio on the web, iTunes (with special playlists), Pandora….more to come…

I noticed on Saturday morning that my Macbook Pro was unusually slow. I ran Activity Monitor to see what was running. A process called “find” was running and the parent was listed as “SH”. That’s pretty close to SSH, the program you use to open a terminal session on a different computer. No one should be SSHed into my computer, so I got a little bit worried.

I googled it and found the answer here. It was only Spotlight updating its index of files. As proof, I opened Console and saw the following under /var/log:

The timestamp was around the time I noticed the slowdown. Mystery solved.

(okay, all my posts can’t be gems.)

To eliminate the logo in Safari and Omniweb, you can use a custom style sheet with a style to override the site’s style sheet. The cow logo is a background image in a div called appheaderlogo. Create a plain text file and add this line to it:

#appheaderlogo{background:white !important ;}

and save it. I call mine “rtm.css”. Then

* go to Preferences in Safari or Omniweb
* choose Advanced in Safari or Appearances in Omniweb
* choose the file you created
* view RTM. If you still see the logo, empty your cache.

You should now have a blank space in place of the cow. The area where the logo was is still a clickable link that takes you to the home page.