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A podcast about all things Macintosh. For Mac geeks, by Mac geeks. Show 217. Apple number 2 music seller in US. Apple updates Macbooks and Macbook Pros. Apple getting greener. iPhone firmware 1.1.4 released. iPhone SDK event scheduled for March 6th. Other random news. Shortcut for quoting in Mail.app. Extending Wi-fi using WDS reduces performance. Technical explanation for the 20″ iMac LCD issue. Removing archived photos from iPhoto. Office 2008 installation and support issues. What’s that grey spiny wheel at startup? Auto-mount shared volumes. A remote control your iPhone. One tool to clone Mac and Windows partitions. Clearing up the Time Machine Air Disk confusion.
New music, Yellow Buddha by The Puffins
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I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast. — “Starman” (1984)
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My suggestion for a new name for the “spinning gear” . . .
. . . “The 8th Circle of Hell” . . . .
or perhaps the “Carousel of Impatience” . . . .
just thinking out loud . . . .
I will say that I have seen official Apple documentation that identified the spinning gear as…
wait for it…
the…
“Indeterminate Progress Indicator”
which is, I guess, exactly what it is.
As a Mac Genius, I call it “the spinning gear.”
My “spinning gear” name .. I call it the …
“Teeth of Despair”
.. or in my more descriptive moments, the …
“Churning Teeth of Despair”
Hi,
I love your podcast! I am really interested in what you had to say about the air disk and time machine. I have four macs that all back up to an airdisk with a 1st gen airport extreme. From the terminal I typed, “defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1” and this allows time machine to see air disks. I have to say that I now have to restart my airport extreme about every other day because for some unknown reason. The base station will just decide not to allow connections and there seems to be no pattern or reason as to why. Maybe this instability in the airport extreme is why Apple disabled the feature.
Thanks for you efforts,
Charles
Love the ‘cast and wanted to provide feedback about renaming the spinning gear. However, I was unable to post in the forums being told that “Sorry, you do not have permission to reply to that topic.”
Since I couldn’t drop a dime in the forums, I’ll be adding a few cents here:
The gray spinning wheel, grinding away on the screen, is an attention train. Finding a profound, universal name may require some retraining. For example, the Pinwheel of Death is known to a good number as the Beachball from Hell (or Death). It’s a call of personal preference if there will be any singular title for this cog, instrument of torture, or perpetual ticking status device.
I’ve always called it “Spinning Startup.” If it gets stuck, I’m stuck in the spinning “Startup Continuum.”
I’d swagger into a string of fun alliteration or witty (or witless) titles that would flatter any thesaurus, but I just lost an hour to save some daylight so we’ll let it set at that.
Thanks.
You are so witty! I call it the “Spinning Gear of Irritation” myself.
I find that darn rotating gear symbol very irritating, too. I don’t have a special name for it. The Gears of Despair?