June 16, 2:00 PM Technology
I have purchased a small device called Spot Connect that uses a bluetooth connection with my Spot Messenger device to allow my iPhone to send small text or email messages even when there is no cell phone connectivity. This is a much better solution to letting people know what is happening when I am in the mountains.
June 15, 11:00 am Technology
It has taken another 2 hours on the phone with a representative of the communications company but we finally sorted out the problems and now have both iPhones working. Almost everyone has a different way of doing things, even within the same company. It was incredibly confusing, and frustrating, but I think we are operational again.
June 14, 3:30 PM Technology
The two iPhone 4 arrived this morning. Good.
I visited the cell phone shop downtown and they installed the sim cards and gave me a set of instructions for updating the new iPhones with all the data from the old iPhones. I tried this out this afternoon and it seemed to work fine. The apps came across and an update to the iOS for the iPhone was installed (this took a full hour).
But the top of the iPhone display showed a "No Service" status. We eventually determined that this seems to imply that the iPhone still needs to be "activated". Frustration was mounting. Our first efforts to figure this out from the provider's website bogged down when we seemed to have to re-input all of our personal data that was given to them when we first contacted them at the beginning of the week. That data should already be there so something is still wrong.
I also stopped in at the iWorld shop in the mall and asked if they had one of the new MacBook Pros with Retinal display. Not yet. They hope they will receive a few sometime soon, but it might be a couple of weeks. They will contact me as soon as one arrives.
June 14, 9:50 am Technology
I am eager to buy the new MacBook Pro with the retina display. This will accomplish 3 goals. I will then have the Lion operating system and be up to date with this. Plus I will then be able to set up an iCloud capability with an external hard drive (I am uneasy with using the Apple iCloud as I think it will quickly become expensive, plus it puts all of my personal files on a remote system that I have limited control over). Third, I will have automatic syncing between my computer, iPad and iPhones.
For me, a real issue is whether to migrate all of my files over from my old MacBook Pro or to keep the new computer "clean" and try to manually move over applications one at a time. I am leaning toward the latter. Now I need to see what is involved in doing this. My first impression is that this is straight-forward using a utility called Migration Assistant.
I definitely want to try migrating just the applications I want to use. Then I want to migrate 3 folders (Documents, Music, Pictures).
Here is a list of the applications that I want to keep:
- Adobe Reader (free download)
- APLX 5.0 (this may or may not work in Lion)
- Bento (database)
- Fetch (file transfer)
- Garmin software (geocaching)
- Pages (wp)
- Sandvox (web authoring)
- Thunderbird (email)
- Firefox (web browser)
- Google Earth
- Epson Scan (scanner)
- Canon MP Navigator (scanner/printer)
- Mindjet Mindmanager (mind maps) (this may or may not work)
- Inspiration (mind maps) (buy version 9.0)
- STELLA (simulation) (does not have a version for Lion at the moment)
- NeoOffice (wp, database, powerpoint) (free download)