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Ok. So I spent my Friday night standing in line at an AT&T store and I come home and realize the iPhone WON’T EVEN WORK without being activated. So, I attempt to activate it and get a message “Your activation requires additional time to complete.” I then activate my wife’s phone and it just works. It has been almost a full 24 hours and my phone still isn’t working.
Anyone else in iPhone activation hell?
Here are some wired rants:
wired rants
I suspect over the next several days, there will be a slew of iPhone reviews from the masses, and that this one will disappear into the tide of the web over the next few days, but I have to say: So far, the iPhone has both met and surpassed my expectations.
I arrived at the Clarendon Apple Store around 2pm today to begin my wait, and I was surprised to see that there were only 60 or so folks who’d shown up before me. The first arrived last night around 9pm, and seemed to spent a night in the rain, somewhat worse for the wear. The rest of the crowd was animated, showing off MacBooks and MacBooks Pro, as well as taking video, shooting stills, all manner of other fairly-Mac-like things to do. iPods were out, playing their swan songs before the debut of their successors, and the same was true for various phones.
As the wait came to a close and the store flooded with eager buyers, I wondered, what must supply be like? We crowded into the storefront in Arlington, snaking through the lines of software, glimpsing the counter at the genius bar, and the piles of boxes behind. Two in hand, I left the store, crowding past the obnoxious camera crews and packs of roaming reporters. I dropped the second off in the hands of its intended recipient and headed for my favorite coffeeshop (complete with open Wireless) for the unveiling of the phone.
Ok. So I got the iPhone…wow that crazy…just made it…was the with the last 4 people to get one…
David Pogue got an iPhone before almost anybody, and he’s already written a 304-page book of tips, iPhone: The Missing Manual. O’Reilly will offer a downloadable version within the next three weeks and the printed version later this summer, but you can see a sneak preview right now.
I especially like this shrewd tip for prolonging battery life:
By covering the [ambient-light] sensor as you unlock the phone, you force it to a low-power, dim screen-brightness setting [and bypass] all the taps and navigation it would have taken you to find the manual brightness slider.
I wonder how much ability developers will have to exploit the phone’s other sensors in new ways. It would be cool to control widgets with the accelerometer and proximity sensor.
Given its timezone (GMT -10), Hawaii will be the last geographic area for the US iPhone launch. My friend Ryan Ozawa is lifecasting (streaming live) from the Ala Moana Apple Store in Honolulu. You can find it at:
I’m heading over to other Apple store a few miles away this afternoon.
Journalist and Mac geek Scott Walker had a great idea for an old Mac mini, a newspaper vending machine, and some Applescript: a home-made digital newsstand.
Here’s the gist of how it works:
The Mac Mini connects to the Internet and to my iTunes library through my home wireless network. Each morning the computer launches a script triggered by an iCal alarm. While cueing up a music playlist, the script automatically gathers images, crops them in half with GraphicConverter and launches a slideshow with PhotoPresenter, a nifty little $8 shareware program with lots of snazzy transitions.
It’s a lovely combination of hardware hack and smart software thinking, and the idea of putting the whole thing inside an old news rack bought from eBay is just genius. Needless to say, it makes me think that perhaps I shouldn’t sell that old redundant Mac mini of mine - I should think of a useful hack for it instead…
Today’s Finger Tips video from Apple is mostly reiterating stuff we already knew, but hidden inside are some useful new things.
My favorites are the magnifier:
and the iPhone reset instructions:
In the reset instructions, iPhone guy says: “If an application is not responding…”, a phrase that serves as an important reminder that this machine is still running a version of OS X, and has the potential to crash just as a computer does. The video makes resetting look pretty straightforward … let’s hope people don’t have to use that function very often.
Read about Hotspotr.com in the July issue of MacWorld magazine. It is WiFi hotspot finder that uses Google Maps as its mapping display. One of the interesting features of the site are the off-the-cuff reviews of the hotspots listed on the site.
The folks at Tumblr have another equally simple and equally useful (IMHO) web application.
Here’s what it does… It lets you share files privately without having to go through a lot of setup magic. You upload a file of up to 100MB to their site, set an expiration period (e.g., good for the next 30 minutes), and then give the web link to the upload file to whoever you want to get it. That’s it. Simple and useful.
Haven’t tried this one yet. But, it is always good to see a multi-platform Open Source app written in Python (I used to write a lot of small utilities in Python before I switched to Ruby). KeyJnote 0.10.0 isn’t a PowerPoint or OpenOffice.org presentation creation replacement. It takes the output from presentations in PDF format (they recommend Xpdf) and adds features such as highlight boxes and spotlights to the presentation.
Sure, Mac OS X has a sticky notes type app already, but…
…is a Mac OS X freeware application has a bunch of additional features including the ability to use formatted text and graphics in a sticky note.
Must be free game list week or something. Here’s Yahoo! Games’ list of 7 free online multiplayer games…
Found it on digg.com which has been having an interesting (to say the list) upgrade experience according to Kevin Rose’s digg blog entry.
YouTube and Adobe (Premiere Express) released the beta site…
The digg.com entry says: A List of 100 legal full version games available to download online from all over the web. The list includes free indie games, free to play mmos, once commercial games that are now free to play, hobbyist games, and many more.
100 of the Best Legal Full Version Games You Can Download Online
I really hate to admit it, but I am going to wait in line at the Apple Store in Atlanta, GA tomorrow and wait for an iPhone. My wife and I are actually going to meet at the mall around 5PM so that we can be there a bit early, but I hope it isn’t too crazy.
What is funny, is that I am probably the LAST person on planet earth that would wait in line for anything, including Star Wars, Amusement Park Rides, Grocery Stores Lines, or concert tickets. Why iPhone, why do you have this power over me. Well, I admit a big part of the attraction will be trying to write a killer Web 2.0 application for the iPhone.
Am I the only guy waiting in line with his wife for an iPhone on Friday……?
Seth Dillingham needs just a handful more applications to reach his target of 100 great Mac apps, the reward for participants in his charity fundraising event in aid of cancer research and treatment.
The premise is simple: Mac developers donate at least five licenses for their applications, and Seth assembles them into glorious packages of software goodness. You then get to bid for one of these amazing packages in an auction. The retail value of each package is already topping the $24,000 mark; but the winning auction bid will be a fraction of that.
So if you’re a developer who’s not yet contributed, now’s the time to get in touch. And if you’re a mere punter like me, keep an eye on Seth’s site for details of how to place your bids when the auction starts.
The official Apple iPhone keyboard video is here. Things that the keyboard does include intelligent type-ahead with word guessing, algorithms to correct for misaligned fingers, predictive resizing of a button’s press zones, intelligent capitalization correction, and more. Yes, there’s still not tactile feedback and I’m not sure if there’s much auditory feedback, and I’m not 100% buying into the punctuation and numbers separation, but it is surely a thing of beauty in and of itself. Go watch the video to see design ideas in action. I can’t wait to try this out.
Anyone else getting cognitive dissonance? On the one hand, the iPhone requires an EDGE-based data plan that takes several minutes to load up many web pages. On the other hand, the iPhone commercials expound upon the fact that the iPhone offers full-leaded iPhone, avoiding those “watered down” versions of the Internet. So what’s a web designer to do? Should you design your site for WiFi iPhone access or water the site down for EDGE? I say you should probably forget EDGE and just assume your site will be viewed with WiFi.
After doing some calculations today, I stared at a minimum $2000-plus price tag for a mandatory 2-year iPhone contract commitment. There are no discounts for AT&T employees or Students or Academics or State employees, etc. Full price for everyone. 2 year contract for everyone. And about $500 of that price tag is EDGE data for the multi-minute-per-page unwatered-down Internet.
As for me, I’d far rather get an iPhone without a data plan and with the cheapest and most limited voice plan, preferably prepaid. Seems to me that unless you’re in a WiFi hot zone, that the iPhone Internet capabilities are pretty awful. Sure, you get push-email, but if I really cared about push-email I’d have bought a Blackberry years ago. (I love the visual voice mail feature that isn’t really worth $20/month.) No, it’s the WiFi smart-phone features that make the Internet. Design for that.
Apple just posted a new Final Cut Pro 6 “Working with High Definition and Broadcast Formats” manual (PDF). This accompanies a bunch of updates to Final Cut Studio including Final Cut Pro 6.0.1, Motion 3.0.1, Color 1.0.1, Compressor 3.0.1, Soundtrack Pro 2.0.1, A combo Pro Applications Update that includes most of the previous items, and a semingly unrelated SuperDrive Firmware Update 2.1.
My O’Reilly colleague Paul Weinstein has put together a very neat Mac hardware hack: he’s using an old Apple II machine as a terminal connected to a Mac mini. It’s a great way to recycle a chunk of old tech that a lot of other people would just throw away.
From Paul’s detailed write-up:
So virtual desktops is workable, but not perfect. What I need is the ability to off-load some of windows, ones that need to be visible even for a quick glance, as needed, an IRC conversation or the output of a running web process, for example. Taking a looking at the applications I depend on I see the beginnings of an idea. Terminal is an interesting application, a piece of software that’s mimicking what use to be a hardware function. Why can’t it be a hardware function again or at least why can’t it be running on a dedicated piece of cheap, reliable hardware?
To re-create his hack you’ll need a spare old-school Mac (hands up who’s got one or more of those lying around gathering dust), and a handful of easily-obtained cables and connectors.
Reading the published reviews, most reaction is very positive. The consensus seems to be that the iPhone’s minor problems and missing features are more than outweighed - to an extraordinary degree - by the quality of what’s offered and the delightful simplicity of the interface. In other words: it doesn’t matter that it can’t cut, copy and paste - it’s still miles in front of any other cellphone on the market.
The glass gets smudgy — a sleeve wipes it clean — but it doesn’t scratch easily. I’ve walked around with an iPhone in my pocket for two weeks, naked and unprotected (the iPhone, that is, not me), and there’s not a mark on it … Call quality is only average, and depends on the strength of your AT&T signal … The Web browser, though, is the real dazzler.
Web-browsing is where the iPhone leaves competitors in the dust. It does the best job yet of compressing the World Wide Web on a palm-size device … Web pages you wouldn’t dare go to on other phones are suddenly accessible, though those that require Flash, Windows Media or Real Media formats won’t work … I found that unless I did a lot of video watching or Web browsing, I could generally last the day, and then charge it overnight.
Lots of people (me included) eschew iPod earbuds in favor of their own headphones. Now the bad news: They may not work. Because of how the connector is designed on the Shure headphones I use, I could not fit them into the iPhone headphone jack … Battery life didn’t prove to be a big problem in my unscientific tests — a mix of calling, surfing, listening and watching. Still, it’s a good idea to charge it overnight.
Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret:
In general, we found this interface, called “multi-touch,” to be effective, practical and fun. But there’s no overall search on the iPhone (except Web searching), and no quick way to move to the top or bottom of pages (except in the Web browser). The only aid is an alphabetical scale on the right in tiny type. There’s also no way to cut, copy, or paste text … Its otherwise excellent Web browser can’t fully utilize some Web sites, because it doesn’t yet support Adobe’s Flash technology. Although the phone contains a complete iPod, you can’t use your songs as ringtones. There aren’t any games, nor is there any way to directly access Apple’s iTunes Music Store.
Thank goodness Apple made the right choice on this one. In all price plans available for a new iPhone, the data usage is unlimited. The data price for the iPhone was crucial; a device so dependent on data had to offer a data price plan that was reasonable. There’d have been outcry if restrictive data plans forced users to keep a constant eye on how much they were downloading.
You can also activate your iPhone from home, using functionality built into iTunes; annoying iPhone guy tells you how in this video. You’ll need OS X 10.4.10; and you have to sign small print agreements with both Apple and AT&T. Quite what’s in those agreements, we can’t tell you just yet. Be interesting to find out, though.
The iPhone launch hype is gathering momentum, and with the hype comes a frenzy of excess, hyperbole and silliness.
Is Apple guilty of raising expectations beyond the norm? Some say it is:
Even for a company that’s mastered the art of product-launch hype, Apple Inc. has propelled iPhone hysteria into the stratosphere.
But don’t forget, knowing in advance when a new Apple product is going to go on sale is something of a novelty. Usually they are simply announced, “shipping today”, and the hype is restricted to just uninformed speculation prior to a keynote speech by Steve Jobs.
This time, though, we know exactly what’s coming. Apple’s been more forthcoming about the iPhone than any other product. It needs to be, because the iPhone has to be seen to be doing well. Apple wants people queuing up to buy; it wants stores to run out of stock over the weekend. It wants demand to be so great that the clamour for iPhones continues long after launch.
Anyway, if you’re too lazy, or not sufficiently fanboy enough to do your own queuing, there’s plenty of other people who’ll do it for you - for a 1000 bucks.
And once you’ve got your paws on an iPhone, there’s another queue of people ready to sell you add-ons, cases, and related doodads. You know, just in case you had some more money to spend.
John Dvorak says he’s fed up with it all:
I am sick of it. It’s all anyone talks about. It dominates the news. It dominates the podcasts and videocasts and magazines. Hitler got less coverage when he invaded Poland.
But he would say that, wouldn’t he?
As promised, here’s some more detail about the acquisition of Mori and Clockwork by Alfonso Guerra of Apokalypse Software. I sent Alfonso a bunch of questions by email, and these are his replies.
Peter “Annoying Audio” Drescher knows ringtones, which is why his iPhone ringtone prediction is especially brilliant:
Let’s say you wanted to corner the ringtone market in the brave new world of broadband. You’d need to produce a database of ringtones for sale in the standard format. You’d want it to cover a wide range of musical styles, since your target audience is “anybody with a cell phone.” You’d want to keep it constantly updated with the latest sounds from the coolest kids. You’d want ringtones cataloged by various attributes, with an elegantly searchable interface.
Gee, I wonder where I might find a prodigious database of high-resolution 30-second AAC files, usually containing the characteristic section of a song? Possibly already being used to preview longer files before purchase? Ready, willing, and legal to be downloaded to a cool new device? Hey, I know!
Ringtone designer Peter Drescher created a music phone by duct-taping an iPod Nano to the back of his T-Mobile Sidekick. But integration between the devices could be better.
What do you think? When iPhones ring, will they be playing random clips from the iTunes store?
I owe Ethan Schoonover a thank you.
It was his Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop that got me thinking about ways I could streamline my working life and bring a little more clarity to my hard disk.
Although I’m not a GTD addict and manage perfectly well with a plain vanilla todo text file, my hard disk has been in a disorganized and unruly state for quite a while. Watching Ethan’s screencasts gave me some ideas for tidying things up.
As a result I’ve separated my ongoing work projects from the dull admin that goes with running a business. I’ve created an inbox where new stuff gets dumped, and told all my internet apps to download stuff to it. Everything feels a bit cleaner and easy to navigate as a result.
I recommend Ethan’s series of screencasts to everyone, not just the Kinkless faithful who already recite the GTD prayer every night. They’re helpful to any computer user who feels as if they need to re-take control of their files.
About 2 weeks ago, my DSL modem started dying a slow, protracted, and painful death. Rather than fork over $80 to Earthlink, I went out to CompUSA and bought a noname modem for quite a bit less. Thanks go to BroadbandReport’s Earthlink DSL FAQ which revealed that I didn’t have to buy direct from Earthlink and pointed out the 0/35 VPI/VCI settings for whichever modem I bought.
Embattled Yahoo! (is everyone else as surprised as I am that Semel retained the CEO position?) released a new web version of Yahoo! Messenger…
Yahoo! Messenger for the Web (Beta)
It doesn’t have any of the extra features available in the client software version. However, it has the advantage of not needing any download or installation and the usual side effects that result. Since it web based, it may work in some enterprises where IM clients are blocked.
Google first announced a slide web app in April 2007 at the CMP/O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo. A limited number of Gmail accounts gained the ability to view PowerPoint slide decks from inside a Gmail a few weeks later. And, now, this feature is generally available to all accounts.
Bean: A Word Processor for OS X… That is pretty self-descriptive. Need I say more? Ok, a little more. It is an Open Source application for OS X Tiger. Its author clearly states that Bean is not a replacement for MS Word. However, it can read and write the Word 97 DOC file format (which was more or less the standard format all the way up to Word 2003).
Looks like Apple has posted a new success story over at the developer connection. Checkout offers a Point of Sale system built in Cocoa and Python.
In a kind of strange synergistic occurance, both Evan DiBiase over at 32584.com and I have been sleuthing (Evan’s “Nancy Drew” reference!) for new Yahoo!Sync references in OS X applications, specifically Address Book. My strings search (strings */Contents/MacOS/* | grep -i yahoo) found a good number of new Yahoo references, which you can examine after the jump. What’s more, Evan also found what completely escaped my notice: a Yahoo end-user licensing agreement in Address Book. (It’s in Contents/Resources/English.lproj/YEULA.html) Pop over to 32584.com to keep up to date on his discoveries.
Yesterday, the Surfin’ Safari blog introduced the newly updated completely redesigned Webkit Web Inspector, compatible with both Windows and Mac. Today, I fired up NightShift, installed the latest nightly build and gave it a go.
The new inspector has a completely different look from the old, translucent gray version. It gives you a lot more space to see things, the elements are all laid out more logically, and there’s far more control and overall usability than previous inspector.
Instead of the old-style red rectangles, the new version highlights items on the webpage using the new Safari-find style gray-overlay. You can see that in the picture here, with the selected item in the Inspector highlighted on the webpage behind it.
To be fair, the old style is in many ways “prettier” than the new one, but the new version fairly kicks the old style’s rear in terms of functionality. Nice work, Webkit dudes!
As a final note, for reasons I do not begin to understand, both the old and the new inspector seem to be in my current Webkit installation. Sometimes the new one loads when I inspect an element, sometimes the old one. Be persistent.
Update: The reason I ended up with both inspectors is that I had both the Webkit nightly build *and* the normal build of Safari running at the same time. I didn’t figure this out until the Window menu showed too few open windows that were clearly open.
A shot of the old-style inspector follows after the jump…
Over at TUAW, I posted about the new Yahoo!Sync framework that gets installed with the 10.4.10 update. I decided to do a little more technical snooping to see what goodies were inside this update and found quite a few phone-specific strings. These follow after the jump. Of particular interest may be the SIM references, the Conduit messages, and the kinds of data that can be synced (address book, calendar, tasks).
Well, the TV update is out, the one so heavily hyped to include YouTube content on your TV. I had expected it, like so many other Apple device updates, to be done from the iTunes control panel, but it’s actually buried in Settings in the main menu of the TV itself. The update itself is fairly painless, but at the end, you’ve got an TV that can pull down H.264 video directly from YouTube and display on your HDTV.
The quality? Well, it’s pretty good. In a lot of cases, it’s as good as the network videos that you get from the iTunes Store. Of course, much depends on how it was shot to begin with, but what began life as choppy crappy flash video has turned into something really watchable on my 30″ Samsung.
The one big issue, though, is getting everything re-encoded. A couple videos that I could find on the YouTube site hadn’t made it out to the TV just yet. That’s going to be the chokepoint for the coming weeks and the adoption of YouTube on the Television set.
Chris Holland has penned an interesting post over on the Internet Brands Developer Blog, suggesting that Apple may have its sights set on integrating VoIP into the iPhone, making it a truly converged communications device. At first glance, it seems unlikely that Apple would be thinking this away about VoIP (and we KNOW AT&T isn’t thinking this way), but Chris makes some excellent points and his predictions are really some food for thought.
I’ve grumbled about .Mac along with others and don’t think Apple’s online service offers much bang for the buck today, but if it became the integrated SIP provider that Chris envisions that could change everything.
A SIP Address looks just like an E-Mail address. A Person’s SIP Address could easily be stored in the iPhone’s Address Book. Apple could build SIP-capability right into the operating system, pre-configured with a number of existing SIP Providers for one-click setup, while still allowing for custom configuration, following a model very similar to E-Mail.
There are a few SIP Providers out there. But Apple could easily roll out its own SIP infrastructure as part of the .Mac framework, increasing their chances of providing a superior out-of-the-box experience, while promoting the .Mac brand to … competitive usefulness. From here, the sky’s the limit as to what Apple can do, leveraging iPhone’s brand and near ubiquitous and still increasing WiFi penetration. Forget about fighting over 3G vs GSM. WiFi and IP are universal WorldWide.
What do you think? Has Chris been SIPping the VoIP kool-aid, or he is on to something?
Hog Bay Software owner Jesse Grosjean has sold notebook application Mori and timer app Clockwork to a new owner, Alfonso Guerra of Apokalypse Software.
The change is effective immediately and the new owner already has a new alpha version available for download (although when I downloaded it a few hours ago, there were few changes other than names and ownership notices).
Right now, work is continuing on getting the Apokalypse web site updated with information about Mori’s future. The one question on the lips of most existing Mori users will be: what about us and our opinions? At Hog Bay, Jesse Grosjean famously adopted a system where users collectively decided the future direction of the product. It remains to be seen whether this system will be continued at Apokalypse.
There’s also the question of what Jesse Grosjean will work on next. It might be the productivity assistant he’d mused about in the past, or perhaps he has other plans. Hopefully we’ll be able to bring you some answers to these questions during the next few days.
Over the last week, a number of web developers have announced Web 2.0-style applications for the iPhone. There’s even a site dedicated to these (although it seems to be down now after all the recent Digg activity.) The idea goes like this: if you’ve got to connect to the Internet with your iPhone, why not publish your Dashboard-style widgets as actual web pages? After all, you can use them on your Mac, on your iPhone and now in Windows. With a bit of low-cost hosting and some decent “lickable” design, congratulations, you’ve become an iPhone developer.
The problem for me about this kind of approach is that moving applications off your phone and onto the web means that you’ve got buy into both a huge paradigm shift as well as an actual data shift. After all, your data is there on the web, while you’re standing here with your iPhone. Does that work for you?
Do you trust the web? How many stories have you heard about Gmail accounts suddenly losing their data? And do you really trust Google and Yahoo enough to entrust all your calendar, word processing and spreadsheet data to them?
What about your things to do list? Do you trust a third-party developer to hold onto that data? And connecting means a data plan, which costs money possibly lots of money. As one comment on my recent post here at O’Reilly noted, are you willing to pay every time you want to check a to-do list? What about if you only use WiFi? Are you willing to wait until a hotspot shows up before you can see what items are on your shopping list? Or before you can add butter, paper towels, and lettuce to that list?
Of course, if you can log into your home computer with the new Leopard Mac-to-go features announced at the WWDC keynote, a lot of these problems become less of an issue. You don’t have to worry as much about trusting your data if you are hosting your own data on your home computer. But you’re still left with the connection issue. Has Apple figured out how to make a data plan so cheap that ubiquitous computing becomes the real killer iPhone app?
Windows users, freshly arrived on Mac OS X, always ask the same questions. One of those is “How do I create a new file in this folder?”
It’s understandable they ask this, because they’re accustomed to right-clicking in any Windows Explorer view, and seeing a list of contextual options which include creating a new file (text or otherwise) at that point.
Whether or not you’re a switcher from Windows, if you’ve been looking for a way of re-creating that behavior on Mac OS X, there are various options available to you.
Document Palette is a freeware application that uses empty template files and a system-wide shortcut to let you pick from a list of new files to add.
NuFile is another choice, which again uses templates you can edit.
On My Command can be used to achieve the same effect, but it’s a geekier solution (and a far more powerful tool as a result).
But my chosen solution is Yellow Camp Software’s New File, because it lets you choose the file type simply by typing in the full filename with extension; then, having created the new file, it opens it for you in the default editor for that filetype. Quick and easy and very convenient.
What’s more, if you open it in Automator and re-save as an Application, rather than as a Finder plug-in, you can then drag that application into the Finder’s toolbar, and it becomes a very handy one-click route to new file goodness.
According to German news magazine “Focus,” Apple is working on an in-car navigation system. Here’s what it says in the article:
After computers, MP3-players, and mobile phones, [Apple] will also offer navigation and stereo systems for cars shortly, starting with Mercedes.
According to information available to “Focus,” the device currently being developed by the US computer maker will combine entertainment, communications, and navigation in one unit.
The new Apple device will be offered exclusively by Mercedes for [the first] six months. Market introduction should be expected for 2009. It is still unclear whether Apple will — similarly to the iPhone — rely on Google Maps as navigation aid.
Although it may seem odd at first for Apple to get into the market of embedded devices, it does make sense product-wise: in essence, the iPhone already combines entertainment, communications, and navigation-like features in one unit. Just add a state-of-the-art GPS receiver and a radio, wrap in a sturdy, industrial-grade case, shake well, and serve!
However, all of the premium car makers already offer sophisticated, highly integrated in-car systems, including Mercedes’s COMAND system, so while it would make sense for Apple to build such a device based on their experience with the iPhone, it remains to be seen how this device would tie in with the car makers’ product offerings.
Recently I had an Apache access log file on a remote server that I wanted to archive. However, it was 3GB, and /usr/bin/zip refused to even admit the behemoth’s existence.
First idea that came to mind was splitting the file into smaller chunks that zip could deal with. For some reason, the prospect of an arduous manual process that would take me through Flag Day didn’t appeal, so I poked around via apropos to see what was available:
$ apropos split
Lo and behold, at the end of a bunch of other stuff,
split(1) - split a file into pieces
(The server was running OS X 10.3, which as far as I can tell does not include the more direct zipsplit utility found on 10.4. Same basic idea, though.)
I copied the behemoth to a secondary drive (took a while) and then navigated to its directory.
$ ls -l
which let me know:
-rw------- 1 robert staff 4239286441 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log
That’s a lot of bytes. Since I want to get the largest file down to a svelte 500MB, I’ll need to use this:
$ split -b 500m behemoth_log
Which, after a long period of splitting, produces these:
$ ls -lh
-rw------- 1 robert staff 3G 10 Jun 04:55 behemoth_log -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:18 xaa -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:19 xab -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:20 xac -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:20 xad -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:21 xae -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:22 xaf -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:22 xag -rw------- 1 robert staff 500M 10 Jun 05:23 xah -rw------- 1 robert staff 42M 10 Jun 05:23 xai
Alterna
