David Jack Wange Olrik » davidolrik

iTunes error 5002 be gone!

davidolrik — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 22:09:30 +0000

Ever since upgrading to the beta iTunes 9.2 I have been having an annoying problem. – Every time I click “Check for updates”¹ I get an error from iTunes.

We could not complete your iTunes Store Request. An unknown error occurred (5002). There was an error in the Itunes Store. Please try again later.

When clicking “Download All Free Updates” iTunes also tells me that the information displayed is outdated, and that I should do a refresh. A second click on “Download All Free Updates” downloads all the updates.

Googling reveals a few, but somewhat complicated solutions for iTunes 8, so I decides to take a look myself. My current iTunes library have existed ever since iTunes 7 and as such it has accumulated a a lot of cruft over the years.

My permissions looked fine, but I had two versions of my Mobile Applications directory.

1 2	~/Music/iTunes/Mobile Applications/ ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Mobile Applications/

I deleted the old Mobile Applications from the iTunes folder² and the 5002 error hasn’t been seen since.

And I do that a lot as I have a mild case of compulsive refresh disorder
The one on line 1 – And if you do this, please remember to back it up first, just in case…

It’s just so nice!

davidolrik — Thu, 20 May 2010 07:38:02 +0000

via tweetie

No related posts.

Moving to a new job!

davidolrik — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 11:42:25 +0000

Im happy to announce that I have just signed a contract with Microsoft, and as of May 1st I will be part of the Windows Phone 7 Series team where I will be responsible creating the user interface of the future.

I almost can’t wait – It’s going to be insanely great!

Update: As many of you¹ had guessed this was an Aprils fool joke, and hell didn’t freeze over and I’m not going to work for Microsoft anytime soon.

But not all, I did manage to fool a few people.

Apple ties iPads to carrier with Micro SIMs?

davidolrik — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:16:53 +0000

Once again John Strand is spreading FUD in the danish press. This time Apples new iPad is the target, and this insanely stupid quote from Politiken.dk says it all:

Apple indfører i iPad’en et nyt SIM-kort, som giver brugeren teknologiske håndjern på. Der er ikke andet end kommercielle tanker bag at indføre et nyt format, og det ser ud, som om denne teknologilås alene skal gøre det nemt at malke kunderne.

Roughly translated, John Strand says “Apple is chaining their customers to one carrier by introducing the micro-SIM standard when only one carrier is supporting it – and they are doing it solely for commercial reasons”.

Guess what… All current and future danish carriers support the micro-SIM standard!

The micro-SIM was developed by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute. It has been around since 1998 and was agreed upon in 2003 by the SMG9 UMTS Working Party which is the standards setting body for GSM SIM cards. The micro-SIM was created with backwards compatibility in mind, and the contact surface of the SIM card is exactly the same as on a mini-SIM and on a full size SIM card.

Dear John, if you want to bypass these technological handcuffs from Apple, simply go to your nearest hardware store and buy a good pair of scissors and cut¹ the excess plastic from your current SIM card.

It’s really not that hard…

I find it sad that “experts” like John Strand get this kind of exposure in the danish media. I find it equally sad that Politiken didn’t bother to fact check the so called “expert” statements set forth in the article.

Don’t spread Fear, uncertainty and doubt – I.e. don’t pretend to be an expert when you so clearly are anything but an expert.

Just like we did back in the day when we ditched the Nokia 2110i for the next great phone – its called progress…

Pick of the week: DocScanner™

davidolrik — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:08:23 +0000

I seem to have fallen behind on my weekly picks, Christmas, $work and life in general have kept me very busy lately, but I’ll try to get back to my weekly¹ schedule again.

This weeks pick is DocScanner, an iPhone app that allows you to have a flatbed scanner² in your pocket. While DocScanner isn’t the most pretty or well designed iPhone app, it certainly doesn’t lack in the feature department.

Notable features include both really good edge detection, OCR and WiFi sharing. There exists quite a few scanner apps on the App Store but this one is definitely the one to get.

On a recent business trip I used DocScanner to keep track of all the receipts I accumulated during the trip. Back home I exported them all to one huge PDF file and emailed it to our accounting department. No need to fiddle with those old school analogue receipts anymore.

My wish list for future versions³ of DocScanner are: A cleaner⁴ user interface, PDF files with the OCR’ed text included and direct upload to Dropbox.

Update: As of version 3.0.3⁵ DocScanner will embed the ORC’ed text into the pdf files!

Please don’t kill me if it isn’t precisely weekly.
and a whiteboard scanner and just about any other kind of scanner you can think of.
and they release new versions quite frequently – About once a month.
and by cleaner, I mean more iPhone-ish
Released on January 30th 2010

Week one without a car

davidolrik — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:23:04 +0000

Today marks the day where we have officially been without a car for a full week! While there are many who have survived without a car their whole life, and don’t see this as something special – it is a a big deal to us because we have grown used to the comfort and ease that a car brings you.

We decided to go green a few months ago¹, so we bought a trioBike with two bikes and a carrier, and have been using that and public transportation² as our sole means of transportation³ since.

So how did the first week go? – I think it went OK, apart from a few minor snags like loosing the bracket that fastens the carrier to the bike, a flat tire and being stuck at Copenhagen Central Station because some guy got hit by a train⁴.

I would lie if I said I didn’t miss our car⁵, but when I see people looking for places to park, and when I drive past gas stations and see the gas prices – I miss the car less and less.

Using the bike for all of our transportation needs forces us to take it down a notch, relax a little and plan our activities a little more which in turn helps us keep the stress level down – so it’s all good

Mostly because my wife wanted to go back to school so she could learn to design beautiful things – and that school is crazy expensive.
Which is actually quite good in Denmark, when you compare it with the rest of the world.
Except for the one or two times we borrowed a car for transporting stuff too big to fit in the trioBike
He god messed up pretty badly, but I think he survived it.
This October has been the coldest in years, and our car had climate control and seat heaters.

iDont care either…

davidolrik — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:14:08 +0000

Nice response to the Droid teaser from Motorola. Should I care? I have yet to see Motorola create any kind of usable phone, but I welcome the competition.

Pick of the week: Tweetie 2

davidolrik — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:00:59 +0000

I have blogged about this weeks pick before but I never made it a pick of the week before. The recent update to Tweetie rocks, so if you are into Twitter¹ I suggest you head over to the App Store and pick up a copy.

The first version of Tweetie for the iPhone was cool, and even won an Apple design award. It was easy to use, looked nice and was very polished.²

Tweetie 2 raises the bar for all iPhone applications, not just Twitter clients. It has been stuffed with all kinds of new and useful features – but in a way that doesn’t make it feel cramped at all! The user interface is very polished³ and it quickly grows on you.

The feature list is too long to repeat here, so I’ll just mention a couple of my favorites: Nearby tweets superimposed on a Google map, Pull to refresh⁴, Multiple drafts, offline mode and full persistence i.e the user interface is restored to the same state after a relaunch or a phone call.

Tweetie 2 also takes advantage of some of Twitters new features that haven’t been launched yet – I’m so looking forward to the new Geolocation stuff. @Twitter: You may release now!⁵

Oh… and Tweetie 2.0 for Mac will soon be released, and will feature sync with the iPhone version and other goodies!

And who isn’t these days?
Except for the refresh button that looked like it had been placed with a shovel. It had to be there and this was the only place it would fit, well kinda…
Some might say too polished, as in eye candy for the sake of eye candy
The ugly button has been hidden, and only comes into view when you need it – nice!
Pretty please!

Pick of the week: Pixelmator

davidolrik — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:44:52 +0000

This weeks pick is a mac app called Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a lightning fast image editor for the mac – kinda like a Photoshop lite but unlike Photoshop¹, Pixelmator really feels like it was build for the mac. Pixelmators feature set is some what smaller than its big brother but most² of the time it will get the job done.

I have been using Pixelmator for a litter over a year now³, and Pixelmator just keeps getting better and better with each new release. The latest release brought the long waited slice tool which is of great use when creating graphics for the web.

Another great thing about Pixelmator is their tutorial section on their website. There the creators of Pixelmator shows you how to use it to create all kinds cool effects.

Pixelmator costs just $59⁴ and is truly “Image editing for the rest of us”.

With each new version of Photoshop it seems to move further away from being a true mac app.
Unless you are need an image editor for professional reasons, it will get the job done every time!
I got it as part of the second MacHeist bundle.
Which is approximately 43.19 EUR, and is way less than any version of Photoshop costs.

The price of Tweetie 2

davidolrik — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:09:58 +0000

I have written about App Store pricing before, and I still fail to understand the “We want free upgrades for life” and “Anything more than $1 is too much” mentality that apparently rules in the App Store customer base.

Tweetie 2 for both Mac and the iPhone have just been announced and the iPhone version will be a separate app from the “old” Tweetie. The fact that you’ll have to pay $3 again for Tweetie 2 made some people go bunkers and some even threw a hissy fit. Guess what… You don’t have to buy it if you don’t want to! There are numerous other Twitter clients on the App Store – take your pick!

Tweetie 2 contains a ton of updates and new features and the “upgrade fee” is certainly reasonable. If Atebits was charging for bug fixes that would wrong, but as you can see in any of these blog posts this is clearly not the case!

Apple has an office suite that costs considerably less than the competitors offering, and each year they release a new version with more features that costs exactly the same as the previous version. – Where is the outcry about that?

I don’t get that people are complaining about $3 for all those new features – for all the effort that Loren has put into Tweetie 2. Tweetie 2 costs less than a Grande Cappuccino at Starbucks, do you also complain to Starbucks that you can’t get a free refill the next time you visit them?

Matt Legend Gemmell said it best when he tweeted this yesterday:

Annoyed you’ll have to pay $2.99 for Tweetie 2? If you’re willing to meet me in person, I’ll give you $5 and hit you in the face.
@mattgemmell

Seriously people, wake up! There are more dire and important things wrong in the universe that are worth getting this upset about!

I for one will buy Tweetie 2 when it gets approved on the App Store!