Infidelity on the iPhone?

Hoax or tragedy? This is just too salacious to pass up …

In Apple’s discussion forums, under a post titled “Pictures automatically attach to e-mail?“, recently registered Susan042764, with only two posts under her belt, asks …

“Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!”

Reminiscing the origins of Tac2 at the tac2blog …

I recently reconnected with some long, but not forgotten, Tac2 colleagues. The Transvaal Amateur Computer Club (tac2) was a hombrew club at the infancy of microcomputing in South Africa. To facilitate a virtual reunion of the club I’m proposing and helping the club draw in members past and present to a new tac2blog where we can reminisce and reconnect by sharing club facts, anecdotes and fond memories of the origins of an industry.

Caption: Out of the original Apple User Group grew the Desktop Publishing User Group (DTP/UG).

How to recover an iTunes playlist!

UPDATE: June 21st, 2010. iOS 4 on the iPhone does away with the iPod app’s On The Go Playlist (last item on your playlist) and has replaced it with Add Playlist … (now the first item in your playlist) — which functions similarly.

• Run the iPod app on your iPhone.
• Click on Add Playlist … (first item in your playlist).
• Create a new playlist by giving it a temporary name (e.g. oldName+, to remind yourself what to rename it to, later in iTunes), then Save it.
• Navigate to your playlists view (top left) if need be — you don’t want o add individual songs but copy whole playlists.
• Select the playlist you want to copy and then from the top of that playlist you’ll find the magic option Add All Songs — the songs in that list will grey out.
• Finally follow that by Done (upper right).
• You’ll now be looking at your new playlist, check to see that it has all your songs listed in it.
• Your new playlist will appear at the bottom of your old playlists, not in alphabetical order.
• Rinse and repeat to copy old playlists into new playlists.
• Sync to iTunes.
• Rename the new playlists on iTunes, back to their old names.
• Sync again.

 
Please read through the entire conversation which follows to better understand the process, precautions, limitations and user experiences …

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The iTunes application has a gaping UI problem, it’s far too easy to delete a playlist and, once deleted, it can’t be undone! I’m not talking about having deleted the original song files, just the playlists you assemble — which point to songs in your music library. We all invest hours in selecting and sequencing our music into playlists. To lose a playlist can be pretty tough!

While working in a playlist you can have two different things selected — the playlist name and one or more songs in that playlist. So which will it trash when you hit the delete key? The selected songs or the whole playlist? It depends on which of the two was most recently selected and, therefore, the darkest of the two different selections. Madness. So with just a modicum of inattentive clumsiness you can easily kill off a whole playlist when you really mean to remove only a single track from it — and there’s no Edit>Undo safety net behind this function.

Miriam Makeba dies doing what she did best: Singing …

[YouTube=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spuz9X8fWjI”%5D
A young Miriam Makeba performs Into Yam in the movie Come Back, Africa (1960)

“Mama Africa”, Miriam Makeba, South African musician and human rights activist died of a heart attack after a performance in Italy on Sunday night, November 9th. She was 76 and passed away doing what she does best and doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, claiming “I will sing until the last day of my life”.

Suggested reading: The New York Times Obituary | CNN’s Miriam Makeba dies after collapsing on stage

Rest in Peace Hannali Blohm …

After a heroic two-and-a-half year struggle with cancer Hannali Blohm died in the early hours of Sunday morning at her home in Caracas, Venezuela. She is sister to a very close friend of ours who is, unfortunately, also suffering from the same disease.

Caption: Chris with Bo and Hannali at Christmas in Winterhaven.

I remember Hannali as a very determined and an unusually generous person — who adopted our family by proxy whenever we visited their home in Winterhaven, Florida. We enjoyed many meals with them, including one especially memorable Christmas dinner. Hannali will be missed by us, but more especially by her family.