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iCloud & Contacts Disappear

Português: iCloud para iOS, Mac e Windows
Image via Wikipedia

I decided to do a mass cleanup of my contacts. Being prudent, I made a backup before, and after, using the “Address Book Archive” option as we’ve been told. Then, all of the contacts disappeared. Fine, no problem, I restored from the backup. Everything looked good but a few seconds later everything was gone again. Fine, I restored from a Time Machine backup. Things went just as badly. I frantically searched for a solution and was relieved to find a post from Richard L. on MacRumours. It was an horrific experience for us to have to share. I’m posting the steps I was forced into due to this obvious near fatal bug from our dearest Apple.

1. Completely sign out of iCloud.
2. If there are somehow any remnants of your contacts in Address Book, delete them.
3. Import your “Address Book Archive File” that didn’t work for long before.
4. Make any edits and clean things up. (some were obscenely mis-alphabetized – a likely corrupted cause of the problem in the first place)
5. Drag each address book entry out of AB individually to a folder somewhere.
6. Delete everything in AB.
7. Drag the mess of vCards back into AB.
8. Log back into iCloud. (You will notice you still have contacts – that don’t sync)
9. Turn off Contacts sync in the iCloud pref pane, keeping your local contacts.
10. Turn it back on. It will kindly “merge” your contacts with iCloud.

At this point you should have a complete Address Book on your mac as well as the nicely synced data on your mac/phone/pad/pod.

Oh, Apple! It “just works,” until it doesn’t. Hopefully those good folks will fix this quite traumatic situation soon.

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iOS 5- Device Not Eligible Error

You’ve gone through the process of updating your OS X to 10.7.2, updating iTunes to 10.5, syncing, downloading iOS 5, and backing up, but after all that clicking and waiting you find that “this device is not eligible for the requested build.”

The culprit would seem to be a now problematic entry in /etc/hosts. Namely, a single line at the end:

74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Well, this line is not in a pristine hosts file and should be removed or commented out. By removed, I mean delete it. By commented out, I mean modify the line to read only:

#74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Of course, you cannot edit the file in place, so copy it, and perhaps a backup (how about “/etc/hosts.orig”) somewhere to edit, then copy that back to the original place – all as an admin user.

Reboot. Rebackup. Rejoice.

New Terminal at Folder

In the past it could be a chore to open a new terminal window at the folder you were in. Even using a launcher such as Quicksilver, you had to manually navigate to where you already should be.

In the new App Store, I noticed a little free app called Go2Shell. You could either place this in the finder window toolbar for click access, or just invoke it from your launcher whilst wherever in your folder structure.

With Lion, while looking through Notational Velocity info, I came upon a new (to me, at least) way to do the same via the Services menu – for those of that particular bent. (If you happen to be, then you already know you can set up a hotkey for any service to avoid the trouble of an unnatural right-click of the mouse). This setting is at:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Files and Folders > New Terminal at Folder

It also allows you to open a new tab in your current terminal right here if you’re the sort who just keeps it open all the time. I selected both to see if it would be aware of the terminal running status and found that if it’s not running only the New Terminal option is available.

Go2Shell still is a great non-fiddly option and I’ll keep it installed. If you have some curiosity, you might go through all those shortcuts and see what gems may be hidden away.

update: geesh … it took me hours to absently use this Go2Shell before i got “it”. slowwww ammm ayeeee.