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Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast.
They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement.
Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

If you have graduated to Aperture from iPhoto as your main photo management software, and like to share your photo library with other users thereby allowing other users to log in and launch a common Aperture library, and you use an iPhone... you may encounter permissions issues. The first sentence, as with other posts, is painfully specific to allow those of you who do not fall into this long-tail user category to save seconds of wasted life by not having to read any further.

A symptom of an unhealthy set of permissions in your Aperture library is a window popping up in iTunes announcing that a sync cannot be completed because you do not have permission. This may also occur because of permission issues with music or movie files.

Apart from selecting the problematic folder, hitting Command + i ("Get Info") and modifying the "Sharing and Permissions" settings, clicking the wheel and selecting "Apply to enclosed items", some possible solutions are:

1) Hold down the "Option" and "Command" keys as you launch Aperture. The following window will appear:

Run a "Consistency Check" (a built-in permissions check-like feature), relaunch, and run "Rebuild Now" (just for fun).

2) If you plan to share your Aperture library among users, you may consider using Disk Utility to create a sparse image disk, and save your Aperture library to it. Like FireWire drives, sparse image disks ignore permissions.

You may also notice that Aperture no longer offers to delete your iPhone pictures after syncing. First of all, best practice is to delete photos directly from the camera itself after you have verified a successful upload of images. However, like many of us I like to ignore best practice and delete directly from the application, as is possible using iPhoto. No more living dangerously, as, second, I'm unaware of any method of having Aperture delete photos from the iPhone.

If anyone know a way, I'd love to return to my reckless workflow...

Since the invention of language, we've been using various technologies to store our data, from the Sumerian cuneiform scripts on tablets to the video files on your iPhone. While there are certain advantages to our modern systems of storage (try watching the latest Boston Legal episode on a clay tablet... talk about pixelation!), there seems to be a consistent pattern of decreasing life-span for the data storage mechanism.

In other words, an inverse relationship exists between longevity and modernity in terms of data storage technology: the more recently a technology is put into wide use, the less time it is expected to last.

There may be many reasons for this including planned obsolescence, free-market battles between proprietary technologies, and the fact that we can't know for sure how long a technology will last without actually testing it. Check back at this blog in 7,000 years and there'll be definitive data.

A corollary to this trend is the fact that we care less and less about where the data actually resides. So-called "cloud-computing" is an example of this. While humans continue to care about data, we are increasingly motivated by making the information important and the medium irrelevant.

The music industry is a good example of this. Those of us in our 40s can remember, and may still own, the same music in vinyl, eight-track tape, cassette tape, CD, and any number of digital format files. It used to be that you needed to play a record on a record player, a tape in a tape player, a CD in a CD player. Now, we can listen to our digital file on almost any device handily available, be it computer, iPod, iPhone, GPS, picture frame... probably even modern refrigerators.

The new strategy for longevity of data is adaptability. To wit: keep multiple versions, in multiple places, on multiple media.

And this is why we have backups of backups of backups.

Teach your students adaptability, so they can last.

And next time you see this message...

*Data from Wikipedia and Wired Magazine (Aug. 2008, One Life to Live, p. 46 - 47).

Sometimes irony can be pretty ironic.

- William Shatner as Murdock, Airplane II - The Sequel

We use two Apple TVs at the school to publish student projects. They provide a wonderful, interactive mechanism for accessing student work in the lobbies. However, not everything, even at Apple, always works as described.

One great feature of Apple TV is the ability to stream music from your iTunes library to your Apple TV.

What Apple, and any discussion forums, fail to mention is that this "feature" can often present the symptoms of a bug. In particular, depending on your Apple TV network connection (ethernet 100/1000, wireless g/n), the size of your iTunes library, and the content you're accessing, the streaming feature may in fact cause video to stutter and pause, or the remote to become unresponsive.

Don't despair, the solution is a check-box away. If your Apple TV is unresponsive enable the "Show only the synced items on my Apple TV" under the "Summary" tab of your Apple TV in iTunes.

This is a good news/bad news solution: you will be limited to playing only content stored on the Apple TV's internal hard drive, however, it will work.

Setting up prudent smart lists and clever syncing will give you all the dynamically changing content you want, even with the 40 GB drive, and help you avoid the perils of a slow or altogether unresponsive Apple TV.

Think of this setting as a mocha-java skinny-latte cappuccino for your Apple TV.

- J. M. Borgman