Christoph Bartneck, Author at Christoph Bartneck, Ph.D.

Firmware update for Drobo FS repairs Time Machine support

The release of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) made it difficult, if not impossible, to use a Drobo FS as a backup destination for Time Machine. The forums were full of frustrated users that had bought the Drobo FS in the believe that the marketing was actually true. Drobo released a firmware update (2.1) but this did not work for me and many others users. I already suspected that Drobo had given up supporting the Drobo FS, but today I noticed that a new firmware (2.1.1) appeared. I updated both the firmware and the desktop client and this fixed the problem. After six months of having to use an external hard drive for my backups, I was finally able to use the Drobo FS again for what I intended it to be.

But I am still disappointment by the lack of updates for Firefly and Fuppes. Both apps do sound very nice, but they are so outdated that they do not play nice with the latest release of iTunes or other media streaming clients. Again, the Drobo marketing does not live up to reality.

Facetree

We are proud to announce that we released the Facetree software. Facetree enables you to cross-reference genealogical data with people in photographs. It helps identifying faces in photographs through a context filter based on genealogical data. The results of the identification are then stored in the meta data of the image using the XMP standard. Continue reading “Facetree”

Microsoft Photosynth

I like Microsoft’s Photosynth for the iPhone. It is a really quick way of creating and sharing panoramic photography. This was the first reason I ever had to install Silverlight. I posted several panoramas from our recent trip in New Zealand.

Using Kiwibank for Google Wallet (Checkout)

I had some trouble getting my account verified in Google Wallet, or Checkout for that matter. Google claimed that the test transaction had been refused by my bank. Kiwibank did not have a clue what the problem could be and even started to give me misleading information. The call center guy thought that the SWIFT number should be put into the routing field, which was just utterly wrong. Contacting Google is also a hopeless endeavor. Their customer support does not exist.

After some internet research I found out that the problem was with the suffix. Kiwibank, and many other banks in New Zealand, only use a two digit suffix. Google does, however, expect three digits. A leading zero was the solution. After I put a three digit suffix in, the test payment went right through.

Repairing corrupted iPhoto library

My iPhoto library was corrupted and even the Apple’s build in tools for repairing the database and rebuilding thumbnails did not longer work. Any attempt to use these tools lead to a crash. Working with the photos was also increasingly difficult, since iPhoto would frequently crash. The library contains more than 33.000 photos spanning 12 years. I was not prepared to give them up.

I have been using iPhoto Library Manager for some time for quickly moving between libraries but today it became my true champion. The software has a tool to recover corrupted libraries. But it works differently from Apple’s approach. It starts with a fresh clean library and imports all the photos, including their meta data, such as location, faces, date. It also manages to rebuild albums and folders. After nearly 20 hours of processing, my new library was fully functional. No more crashes or missing thumbs.

The culprit turned out to be the QuickTime plugin Perian. Once I uninstalled it, iPhoto worked without crashing. It is a pity, since Perian is so useful.