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Ever since I installed Leopard on my personal laptop, I’d been having problems syncing information across my two computers (one of which still ran Tiger) using the .Mac sync feature. Keychain sync didn’t seem to be working at all, and the others were spotty.

So when I finally upgraded my work laptop to Leopard a couple of weeks ago, I thought my problems would go away. Not so much, in fact. I was still having problems, and they had actually gotten worse. My personal laptop, with a fresh install of Leopard (as opposed to my work laptop, which had just been upgraded) stopped syncing altogether; the Sync application kept crashing.

After some reading around, I deleted the sync history by removing the Local folder from ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices, but while that helped, it still didn’t seem to solve my problem fully. Now keychain and mail account syncing was working beautifully, but Safari bookmark sync wasn’t working at all.

And now, thanks to Daring Fireball, I know how to fix it. Woo!

So when I moved earlier this year, I bought an Airport Extreme base station. And typical of my luck, Apple announced the release of Time Capsule, a wireless backup solution (and the only realistic way to use Leopard’s Time Machine backup feature with a laptop) just a few weeks afterward.

I wasn’t too exercised by it, though, because I figured that I could just hook up a USB hard drive to my Airport Extreme and do the same thing. Imagine my chagrin when I found out that Time Machine wouldn’t recognize drives connected to the Airport Extreme as valid backup locations. Pretty dumb, I thought.

Thankfully, Apple released a firmware update (7.3.1) last week that enables you to use drives connected to the Airport Extreme as Time Machine backup destinations, so after much rejoicing, I went to my local Best Buy and bought myself a 1TB My Book external hard drive; I was going to have the poor man’s version of the Time Capsule, or die trying.

Now picture the tragic scene when I plugged the hard drive in, and neither of my Leopard laptops’ Time Machine installations saw the drive, even though it was mounting properly through the Finder. After floundering around a bit and searching the internet, I found out that Time Machine requires backup drives to be formatted with the HFS+ Journaled file system, and the My Book had shipped formatted in FAT32.

OK, simple enough, I thought. I’d just use Disk Utility to reformat the drive, and I’d be good to go. But, alarmingly, the the reformat kept failing with an error, and the only format I could get the drive successfully reformatted in was FAT. On a whim, I thought I’d try to make two smaller partitions on the drive and see if that worked. It did. But that’s odd, seeing as the HFS+ spec says the maximum volume size is 2 exabytes, and even regular HFS can handle 2 terabytes. What gives?

Regardless, now I have two 500GB partitions on my wireless backup drive, which actually works out for the best, so that I have a cleaner separation of the backups of my two different computers. All’s well that ends well.

Until what, you ask?

To me and a small group of my friends, it’s 7 days until we go to Vegas to celebrate my 30th birthday. This is my personal guarantee: Vegas will never be the same.

To most everyone else, though, it’s 7 days until Apple releases the next version of Mac OS X: version 10.5, named Leopard.

I have, of course, already pre-ordered^* my copy, and await it with bated breath. I plan on installing it on my personal laptop, a G4 PowerBook, but will wait until the first couple of patches come out (as, inevitably, they will) to install it on my work laptop.

Look out for my first impressions after installation, much like I did with Tiger. In the meantime, check out this neat-o guided tour.

^* What does this mean? That I’m ordering it before I order it? This is a flagrant bastardization of the English language, much like the words “pre-board”, “pre-install”, and “pre-fetch”. Jesus.

The time that Apple officially releases Leopard, their next version of Mac OS X, is rapidly approaching—most probably within the next few weeks or months—and it’s a good time to revisit the predictions and announcements made about it at WWDC last August. Frankly, as you’ll see if you follow that link, I wasn’t too impressed with the list of new features they’re advertising, other than the Mail-iCal integration, and the new virtual desktop feature, but apparently something was held back at the initial announcement, a number of “top secret” features that would only be revealed to the public after Leopard’s launch:

Leopard, for its part, remains a work in progress. Apple seeded developers with a new build of the operating system on March 2, delivering substantial performance and stability improvements over previous builds. That most recent build, 9A377a, is also more than 200 Mbytes larger than previous releases despite the omission of any notable new features, suggesting Apple may be laying the underpinnings for the “top secret” features Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in August would be included in Leopard but have yet to appear in any form.

They haven’t revealed any new information about what the “top secret” features of the OS are going to be yet, but if these as-yet-unknown features are indeed the “big guns” a lot of rumor sites are calling them, I’d certainly be interested in finding out what they are.

in San Francisco, but I’m not going to it. I am excited, however, for the Leopard preview Steve Jobs will be giving sometime this week. To get yourself in the mood, here’s a little pre-conference prognostication by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.

but it looks like Apple will unveil its latest version of Mac OS X, code-named Leopard, at WWDC in San Francisco next month. Exciting news, indeed. I’m sure that, in keeping with its recent tweaking of the software giant, Apple will not resist the temptation to send a few snarky (and well-deserved, in this case) comments Microsoft’s way about its utter failure to get the next (and, alas, not much improved) version of Windows released in a timely manner. (Via Slashdot—I know I’m really showing how much I’ve not been surfing in the last few months by making this comment, but I saw the new Slashdot site design today for the first time, and I heartily approve. Very nice!)

I wanted to find out more about Apple’s new Mac OS X release, 10.5 (codenamed “Leopard” and due out in late 2006 or early 2007), so I looked around. Here’s what I found: the Leopard Wikipedia page and some rumors about new features at LoopRumors. Both talk about an overhauled finder with closer Spotlight integration, as well as a more unified UI (the “solid metal” look of Mail and the iLife apps). What would really be cool is if they added arbitrarily extensible metadata to the file system, to really make use of Spotlight’s capabilities, but that may be a long way off.

Incidentally, I found something else interesting on my search: the Origami Project, a teaser website for a mystery product (apparently from Microsoft) to be revealed tomorrow, 2 March 2006.