Just want to document this for Google to pick it up, just in case somebody else has a similar issue. The issue was that my iPhone stopped syncing. There was a variety of errors: timeouts, cannot read disk, hanging forever while syncing or just not recognizing the iPhone after connecting. I tried everything - restoring, reinstalling iTunes, swapping cables, but nothing helped. More mysterious, my iPod synced without problems.

The key to the solution was in the Mac OS X logs: the message

This somehow hinted an USB problem and after I disconnected a SanDisk ImageMate 12 in 1 Card reader the problem was solved.

This is by the way one of those situation where Apple's user friendliness gets into the way of solving an actual problem. None of the error messages displayed in iTunes hinted that there's an issue with USB. Good that's Mac OS X is UNIX and there's always a log to look at.

Back from one of our short trips to Germany, we learned or confirmed three things:

First, business class is the way to fly, if you don't have to pay the full price yourself, that is (thanks again, Christian!). It's not only the amenities, such as a much more comfortable seat, where you can actually sleep, but also that you're not being treated like cattle. Here you can still find something of the old glory of travel.

Second, business class or not, airlines loose, or better mislay your baggage and don't care too much. We waited three days for our suitcase to be delivered, right in time for having fresh clothes on the flight back. Next time we'll be better prepared, with bigger hand luggage and multiple pieces, which hopefully don't get all lost at once.

Third, as nice as it is to visit family and friends, we're always looking forward to get back home to New York. People have different preferences, but we like this city very much, for it's dynamic and its diversity and even for its insane weather.

I've been looking for this a long time: a mobile device that I can carry with me all the time and that I can use to write. E-mails, blogs, stories, screenplays, notes, which means significant amounts of text. A laptop would be ideal, but is too heavy to carry around, just in case. A smart phone is too small to write more than a few lines in an e-mail. So I want something in between.

On New Years Day I stumbled over the Asus Eee PC, the "Surf" version, that is. This is a $299 ultra-portable that runs some version of Linux. It has almost no storage (some 300 MBytes are free), so it's more or less meant as a dumb Internet terminal. It's close to useless in that capacity, however: the WiFi client is ridiculous, forcing you to enter the WPA key every time it connects. It comes with Firefox, Skype and some other Internet apps, but the 7" screen doesn't make them fun to use. Firefox, for example, wastes almost half of the screen real estate with it's various tool and status bars. For a new class of device you need a new class of software - Asus is doing it on the cheap - literally - and the result sucks.

It can be a quite useful device nonetheless. It has the classic laptop form factor, with a real keyboard, a little smaller of course, but with a right look & feel. And I'm strongly convinced that ultra portable should have either a real keyboard or none at all. Nobody so far has figured how to do the latter right (guess we need to wait for Apple on this), so the Eee's conventional keyboard is the way to go. It also comes with OpenOffice installed, which contains a pro-grade word processor. Again, OpenOffice has its issues to fit in that small frame, but all in all it's usable for serious writing.

But how do I keep it in sync with my laptop? In theory, the Eee should connect to shared network drives, but while trying that I quickly ended up tweaking the Samba configuration files. Now I do know a thing about Linux configuration or two, but this isn't worth the effort. Fortunately there's an easier way: I use a SD card as primary storage on the Eee. With the help of ChronoSync on my MacBook it automatically syncs whenever I put it into the card reader. Sweet.

Remains the battery life, which is, as always, a bitter disappointment. The Eee gives you some 3 hours uptime, which is close to ridiculous, but apparently this is all you can get these days. My commute is around an hour each way, so I can live with that for now.

All in all I prefer the Eee much over other ultra portables, which I find far too expensive and lacking a real keyboard. But there's still an opportunity out there for the perfect mobile device that fits functionally a smartphone and a laptop.

I've always thought Apple TV is a great idea, simply because I like listening to music and watching movies in the living room, rather than on my PC. But Apple TV had its flaws and everybody was waiting for the next update (or for its discontinuation). Well, finally it happened and Apple released a free update, which includes tons of new and improved functionality.

The big one is access to the iTunes store, including movie rentals, sometimes even in HD. That's certainly a smart move - however you need a really fast Internet connection for making HD downloads work: we tried it two times and eventually gave up waiting for the data trickling down the net.

But it's the smaller improvements I like the most:

• Apple TV acts now as a wireless speaker from iTunes. This very elegantly allows to "remote control" an Apple TV (one item on my first wish list). Also on our last party we could play the same music in both rooms, which is kind of cool.
• The distinction between synced and streamed content has finally been dropped. This was pretty annoying, because for accessing the full media library one needed to go through several menu items to switch between the local and the remote library. This happens now automatically and you can even turn the iTunes sync settings to "automatic", which copies supposedly the latest media to the Apple TV hard disk.
• Originally we bought Apple TV mostly for watching photos on the big screen. However this was only slightly less cumbersome than pulling a projector out of the cabinet and erecting a screen: if the photos were on a different machine than the one Apple TV synced with, you needed to copy them explicitly over, ideally reducing their size for saving disk space. The new Apple TV finally streams photos from Flickr, ,mac , iPhoto or Aperture from any computer which is connected to Apple TV.

So all in all I'm pretty happy with the software update and my wish list is more or less reduced to one item: streaming music from Internet radio stations. Can we please get this?