The TimesMachine – How it was built

Nice article about how the TimesMachine was built. See here.

I saw a presentation in California (I think) by Evan Sandhaus, one of the authors of this article, about the TimesMachine. He did a great presentation and explanation of the product and I the idea of using mapping is pretty cool.

Why Apple assembles in China

The answer? Educated people and wages.

See Gruber’s article here. I think that discussion becomes very interesting as wages rise in China.  As Gruber points out the jobs these folks are doing might be defined as ‘menial’ but the jobs take skill. So the Chinese market offers the both skilled labor and until recently, inexpensive labor.

As China’s economy changes and wages become higher low cost assembly will (and is moving) move to other countries. Do other countries offer the same combination that China does or is the ‘savings’ that a company takes partially eaten by training of employees?

Nice changes to Dropbox

TidBITS did a nice write up on the changes here

The nice one is the increase to 1TB of storage for the Pro accounts. 

I also happen to like the read-only feature for files and expiration dates for shared links.

Dropbox and the case of the missing contextual menu

Was working along yesterday, put a file into Dropbox and went to get the link and…

Wait… no contextual menu?!

I dug around a bit and found this video

Don’t know why the contextual menu plugin would have disappeared in the first place but the video got my rolling again.

Google Drive … I found out what was driving me to drink

I started using Google Drive awhile ago because my colleagues were. Easy to use applications that have the collaborative features we were looking for. 

I didn’t install the Mac client for Google Drive that syncs the contents of your Google Drive to the local machine. About two months ago I did. 

Shortly after that I noticed a weird thing that started to happen. 

I would be happily typing along in some application and the application would move to the background. Click on the app or use the command keys to move the app back to the front…and it would happen again. 

It was driving me crazy. 

One day I was typing merrily along and it happened…again. However, this time I noticed the Google Drive Icon in the menu bar flash at the same time the foreground app moved to the background!

Sure enough that was the problem. Set Google Drive to ‘pause’.

Problem solved.