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Sunday night talkcast: Mac OS X gripefest + Ask TUAW

Last week's talkcast featured the dulcet tones of guest host Christina Warren and a passel of MacBook Air owners sharing their experiences with the newest laptop in the Apple lineup. Download direct, listen in your browser or subscribe to the TalkShoe feed in iTunes.

Join us again on Sunday night for our next live show, 10 pm ET, where Mat Lu and yours truly will be taking a break from the Oscars telecast (if you're DVRing it, be sure to say so -- we don't want to spoil anything!) to take your questions, gripes and wishlist items for Mac OS X. Got display problems or wireless issues? We want to hear about it. Everything running smooth as silk? We want to hear about that too, but be warned that the people with problems may be very annoyed with you.
As always, you can join the conversation on TalkShoe either with or without an account by using the shiny new browser-only client (no downloading required and no registration needed). Just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. You can also listen in on the Talkshoe page or call in on regular phone or VOIP lines: dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077.

Last week's talkcast featured the dulcet tones of guest host Christina Warren and a passel of MacBook Air owners sharing their experiences...
 

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Swampash

To Michael Rose above - I had no idea that command existed. It certainly seems to accomplish what I need - thanks for the tip!

February 28 2008 at 8:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Swampash

Re: copy/merge

Over the weekend I suffered a hard disk controller failure during a copy operation, and the failure deleted about 5% of the data on the disk. The problem is, the data lost was spread out over almost every directory. One file from this directory, two files from that directory, nothing at all lost from that directory, one file lost from that directory - you get the idea.

I had a full backup on a NAS so nothing unrecoverable. But OS X's copy behaviour meant that I had to copy over EVERY FILE rather than just those files that were missing. In order to make sure that I restored every missing file, OS X forces me to copy over the top of a very deep directory tree -- well on the way to a terabyte of data, when the missing files might measure only in the hundreds of megabytes.

Darwin's crippled "cp" wouldn't even let me issue "cp -R -u".

Sorry, but that's retarded. I shouldn't have to go out and buy a backup and restore program when an EIGHT-CHARACTER instruction at a bash prompt would do the job.

February 24 2008 at 11:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Swampash's comment
Michael Rose

cp is the wrong command. Try 'ditto' instead. http://www.hmug.org/man/1/ditto.php

Or use FileMerge, part of the developer tools:

http://www.macworld.com/article/49584/2006/03/cmpfldr.html

Or read this: http://lowendmac.com/misc/05/1024.html

February 25 2008 at 12:05 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stephen Macklin

In 24 years of using the MAC professionally I have never once noticed the absence of the option to merge the contents of folders. I guess I always simply copied or moved the actual files I wanted to copy or move.

I don't really feel I have suffered.

If they added that feature tomorrow I doubt I would ever use it.

February 24 2008 at 5:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DPaulsen

Also...Sorry for the double post....If someone could discuss converting an ISO file so it could be manipulated in iMovie, I would appreciate it. (I am trying to put a highlight reel for my brother's sports team together, but all ew have is dvd's of the games after they were dumped from an HDD camera.

Thanks again.

February 24 2008 at 5:10 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
DPaulsen

Could you each talk about what kind of Microphone you are using for the talkcast? Michael Rose, you usually sound the best, but I was not sure if that was because you are hosting or if you just used a superior input device.

Thanks.

February 24 2008 at 4:55 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jake

I had a question about how to transfer DVR'ed programs to my Mac, or if there was someway to put a TV-tuner of some sort on the mac? I've heard of products like EyeTV, etc. I have no idea on what these products do.. Thanks! I'm basically just trying to record TV programs so I can transfer them to my iPod, iPhone, etc. Thanks!

February 24 2008 at 2:36 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bob

After the upgrade to 10.5.2 Spotlight has been flakey. It's been indexing my drive for weeks now. Spotlight says '-2147483648 hourse remaining' (yes, that's a negative).

I used Spotless and totally clean up the indexes and removed Spotlight and restarted Spotlight from scratch. No change.

I've used Disk Utilities found no problems. Disk Warrior 4 finds no problems.

Went to the Apple Store, they delete the cache files, Disk Warrior 4, some other "magical things" in the back of the store, but still Spotlight continues to index and take 100% of my CPU.

Any recommendations?

February 24 2008 at 2:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
potato

How about we address THE most fundamental problem (IMHO) with MacOS, and that is the piss poor Finder. File management on Mac (without resorting to CLI) is the worst out of all of the major OSes.

Step 1 on that list IMHO is folder merging. If I copy a folder into another, and a folder by the name already exists, it should let me merge the contents of the two, like EVERY OTHER OS DOES ALREADY, instead of simply prompting me to cancel or replace. This is something that we've been begging for since 10.0, and it's sad that something this basic isn't even in.

Step 2 is editing multiple file properties at once. Go now, try this - select a bunch of files, and then go to Get Info, it brings up an inspector for EVERY single file, separately. What it should (and what every other OS does) is merge the settings into one pane, so I can do things like mass-editing of file extensions, or file permissions, or anything else.

Do those two things and maybe MacOS can be on its way to becoming a respectable OS in terms of file management (which, IMHO is a pretty core aspect of the OS).

February 24 2008 at 12:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
4 replies to potato's comment
Luigi193

I've all of a sudden had issues with my Airport Extreme (802.11n) with the 10.5.2 upgrade... Im not alone either.

The only cure is to unplug the frickin thing and run web sharing from the iMac... there is NO WAY im buying another one... HURRAY UP APPLE.

February 24 2008 at 12:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
John

I just made the big switch with an iMac 24" a few weeks. Absolutely no gripes, I'm loving it. Leopard runs smooth and I've been throwing a lot at it. My wife, a non techie, loves it as well. I have to admit that after a lot of worry...migrating from a PC to Mac was a helluva easier than any of the PC to PC migrations I've done.

February 23 2008 at 9:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to John's comment
Rob

Just made the switch too, after 20+ years on winBlows I finally was fed up with having to act as a babysitter for my laptop every day that I didn't get viruses, spyware, malware, etc., etc., ad nauseum.

And I COULDN'T BE HAPPIER! The switch was far, FAR easier than I had imagined it would be. WinBlows taught me that computing was a chore, so I was apprehensive. But owning a Mac now has taught me easy computing can, and should be: a Pleasure.

To all Winblows owners: SWITCH!! You WILL NOT regret it! :-)

February 24 2008 at 12:08 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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