Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Freeing up Iphone Space

Say you have an iphone, and you've had one for like 4 years.  Lets say you NEVER delete texts.

Guess what? Those videos of  Junior in the pool that you sent to your whole family...maybe your dog sleeping in that funny pose... the 72 panoramic pictures of Yellowstone...well, those take up space.  I personally had 1.3 gigs of it, which is equivalent of a whole movie in standard def.

Apple does a lot of things right, but iTunes isn't one of them.  I just have a miserable time with that program. I mean , who's idea was it to combine the player functionality with the file management functionality with the backup functionality with the online store functionality?  I mean..no wonder it sucks.    Its a great example of why doing one thing and doing it well, the Unix philosophy, is so

Don't take my word for it.  3.3 Million hits on the query "why does itunes suck" .  Webmonkey hated it 5 years ago, and  a great dissection on xk9 just six months ago.  

But this blog is about solutions, so here's one I found that actually worked.  It takes some technical competence or confidence at least.   Follow this, have faith, and get ready to try it twice because I had to for some reason.


The Method:

  1. Make a backup in iTunes
  2. open iBackupBot (Google it)
  3. Go to the relevant backup
  4. Click on Multimedia File Manager and click on the other Multimedia files tab
  5. Sort by filename by clicking the Filename tab
  6. Find MediaDomain/Library/SMS/Attachments and highlight all of them, then press delete.  You can also click to export to a folder of your choice, if you want to save them that is. 
  7. Then go to System Files>MediaDomain>Library>SMS>Attachments
  8. They will be all listed here, highlight them all and press delete
  9. Then just restore that backup using iTunes
  Tadaa! Space recovered, your messages are still there but without the attachments! 

Good luck and let me know if it works...and thanks to the fellow who posted this on the itunes forum!


Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Don’t Torture Your Tech


I was at a performance for one of my children the other day and I saw some woman whip out some giant pink tablet that looked like it was stolen from a local preschool. It was pink, with a big handle and just gnarly, and she was waving that thing all over the place trying to get a picture of her kids performance.   It had a Polaroid logo, and that kinda made sense since Polaroid has gone bankrupt and is justly out of business. Because anyone who came up with this thing must, by laws of God and Man, go out of business. 


The monstrosity is shown below:


Really?  Are you kidding me?   I’m like, you better return that before Steve notices its missing from the Blue’s Clues set.    But upon Googling to troll anyone who bought this abomination,  to find out what dark corner of techdom this slithered out of, I came to find that it wasn't a tablet at all, but a case.  An Ipad Case. 

So let me get this straight. 

You’re going to take this $500 dollar beauty that Steve Jobs probably put more love into than his own children...                            
Gorgeous...aren't I? 

And you’re going to put it into this:

No no no no no no noooooooooooooooo!


I understand the desire to protect a precious piece of technology. I really do.  Kids are bad for tech…they are.  But its just wrong, and if you going to insist on doing it, do not bring it out of the house to a public event.  This is why God invented the emotion of shame.  Keep it home. Or buy your kid something cheaper.  

Of course this habit of putting an offensive carapace over our high end designed items ins't exclusive to Apple. Here's super sleek HTC One.  I'd live inside this phone if i could... 

Sexxxxxyyyyyyy

Then you go and do this...

Non Compos Mentis



I mean, is deer or a pheasant vision so acute that it can peg good design from 100 yards? 


"WOAH dude, you almost had me but that slick HTC One really got my attention.  You should wrap that sucker in a Otter Case."  


Not going to happen.   And what about carbon fiber?   Boeing makes 787 WINGS out of carbon fiber...are you going to fly your phone home?  Use it to shield yourself from bullets? Use it as a Captian America shield? 

Phones are tougher than they used to be, and so are tablets.  And you replace them every few years anyway.  So seriously people - stop wrapping your tech in bullet-proof carbon fiber vomit-inducing pink coffins and set them free!