recovery
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SpaceX pulls off its first double fairing catch after a Falcon 9 launch
Part of the SpaceX mission has been to create reusable rockets that make spaceflight cheaper, and it has become routine to see the company’s booster rockets return safely to Earth.
SpaceX tried to catch both halves of a Falcon 9 nose cone (updated)
Later today, in what will likely be its last mission of 2019, SpaceX will attempt to recover the entire nose cone section of one of its Falcon 9 rockets. If successful and the rocket itself is able to land on SpaceX's recovery ship, it'll mark the first time the company has caught both pieces following a single launch.
Watch SpaceX catch a piece of its rocket as it falls from space
Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral. This was the third flight for this particular Falcon 9, and its mission was to carry the AMOS-17 satellite for Spacecom. While you can watch the full launch stream here, one of the most exciting parts of yesterday's event came as a tweet from Elon Musk. He shared a quick video of a SpaceX ship catching the rocket's fairing in a net as it fell from space.
Polar's latest watch knows if you're too tired for a full workout
Sleep tracking and personal fitness gadgets are nothing new, and even the cheapest knock-off wearables will do a decent enough job of monitoring the main criteria, so companies are constantly looking at ways to make their devices even more useful. Polar's latest watch, Polar Ignite, does exactly that by combining comprehensive sleep data with personalized training, helping wearers achieve optimal workouts.
Airbnb is encouraging tourists to visit Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico suffered the worst natural disaster in its history in September last year, when Hurricane Maria tore through the island, causing devastation that's still affecting its inhabitants. But it remains one of the most beautiful destinations in the world, and Airbnb wants to help it back on its feet with an expanded partnership effort to boost tourism to the area.
World of Warcraft gives you a way to undelete characters
Those World of Warcraft GMs are probably beyond sick and tired of player petitions to undo a character deletion if a recent dev post by Blizzard is any indication. Coming with Warlords of Draenor is a new feature that will allow players to resurrect a deleted character with its gear and enchantments intact. The studio even said that it will even hold onto deleted character names "for a limited time." There are a few exceptions to the undelete feature. Toons under level 10 won't be recoverable at all, and those between levels 10 and 49 will be lost forever after a set amount of time. Also, players can use this function only once every month, so undelete wisely!
Report: GAME preparing to rejoin stock market
2012 wasn't kind to retail chain Game - after closing more than 200 stores in the UK and Ireland, shuttering its Australian division, filing for administration (bankruptcy) and getting delisted from the stock exchange, its operations were purchased by sister investment companies. Luckily for GAME, it appears to have phoenix-like qualities - Sky News reports that the company is planning on rejoining the stock market. The effort will supposedly consist of a £300 million flotation later this year, which would involve selling shares of the company to the public. The move would suggest a strong performance from the retailer during both the holiday season and the launch of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, with the former doubling the Xbox 360's UK debut and the latter moving 700,000 units in Europe and Australia by December.
Sony's My Xperia smartphone recovery service launches worldwide
Sony's My Xperia phone-finding service isn't just for Nordic climates anymore; following a pilot earlier this year, the recovery tool is now rolling out worldwide. Anyone with a 2012- or 2013-era Xperia phone should get access within the next few weeks. Whatever Sony device is involved, the web-based controls are the same: owners can pinpoint a lost phone's location, lock it down, sound an alert and wipe its storage. If you just can't bear to part with your Xperia Z, you'll want to sign up for My Xperia at the source link.
OnLive's year-long road to recovery involves more partnerships
Bruce Grove, general manager of OnLive in the UK, revealed a 12-month "recovery plan" for the company in an interview with MCV UK. The plan involves building more partnerships to expand the service's reach, though Grove didn't specify who the company would partner with in the future."We have a road map for how soon we start with certain things, what the focus is, what we're going to be doing, what the next twelve months will be. And that's a big shift for the company: Having a 12-month plan," Grove said. "That's something that's going to show how we'll build this into a long-term sustainable business."OnLive went through a rocky period of transition before former CEO Steve Perlman left the company in August. The company cut 50 percent of its staff prior to spinning off into a new company entirely while maintaining the OnLive brand and service."In the past we've been very focused on OnLive being the driving force of wherever we've gone. Now, it's much more about engagement with our partners. That's going to be the way we reach the new customer market," Grove said.
AT&T planning new option to hinder stolen iPhones (Updated)
According to The Verge, AT&T is set to launch a new service meant to thwart cellphone thieves. The company will allow customers to shut down voice, data and SMS on stolen devices. AT&T has reportedly issued information to employees on how the service will work. Customers will be required to inform an appropriate AT&T rep of a missing phone, etc. By shutting down those three services, customers will prevent the phone from being used without having to endure the inconvenience of a SIM block. This may tie into April's news of a national multi-carrier registry of stolen phones. It's worth noting that turning off data service will presumably also knock out Apple's Find My iPhone capability, which would impair users' ability to track down their own phones. No word on cost or availability of the service from AT&T yet, but we have reached out to them for comment. Update: Comment from AT&T's press team -- "As announced in April, AT&T is creating a stolen phone database to prevent devices reported stolen from accessing wireless networks. We will install this availability next week for AT&T phones on our network and are working toward a cross-carrier solution later this year."
Transformer Prime gets power of reincarnation with Team Win Recovery Project 2.1.2
Known affectionately as Twrp, this handy utility allows you to backup and recover your Android world even as you flit effortlessly between different custom ROMs. Two-point-oh worked great on a limited selection of devices, like the Nexus S, Kindle Fire and TouchPad, but this latest update brings improved support for Honeycomb tablets and ICS handsets like the Galaxy Nexus, while also doing its thing on the Transformer Prime for the first time. Team Win has even introduced a OpenRecoveryScript function, which lets apps influence the recovery process in order to preserve even more consciousness across rebirths. Now, if only we could root karma.
Amazon's Bezos finds Apollo 11 rocket engines in ocean, contemplates shipping options
Ya' know, there's nothing like a little rocket engine hunting to save oneself from the doldrums of generating billions of dollars in revenue in the private sector. At least that appears to be the case for Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who spearheaded an ocean expedition to find the F-1 engines used in the Apollo 11 mission. Forget newer stuff like the GENIE, Vega and Slytherin's SuperDraco -- the classic F-1 is still the rocket engine that ignites Bezos' proverbial liquid fuel. Having found his prize resting 14,000 feet below the surface via deep sea sonar, Bezos' team is now trying to recover at least one of the engines. Bezos says NASA still retains ownership of the F-1s but he's hoping the agency will allow one of them to be displayed at the Museum of Flight in Amazon's home turf of Seattle if both are successfully retrieved. No word on whether the rocket engines will be delivered via Super Saver Shipping.
Dear Aunt TUAW: Should I mess with my recovery partition?
Dear aunt tuaw, I'm hoping you can tell me how to perform a non-destructive reclaim of the recovery partition space. I'm on Mac OS X Lion and wish to simply reclaim that odd 700 MB without jeopardising my main partition. Your loving nephew, Oscar Dear Oscar, Auntie is sorry, but this sounds to her like an absolutely utterly terrible idea. Lots of services require that the recovery partition be left alone. Find My Mac is the first thing that comes to mind. But that's not all. Apple put that recovery partition there for a really good reason -- it's one of the best ways you get to reinstall the OS, repair your disk, or restore from Time Machine without having to deal with external discs. Sure, if you have a 64 GB SSD (Auntie does on her beloved MBA), that 700 MB represents a big chunk of space -- but Auntie feels it would be tremendously poor judgement (metaphors about "penny wise pound foolish" spring to mind) to try to proceed in the direction you're proposing. Hugs, Auntie T. Got advice for Oscar? Disagree with Auntie? Sound off in the comments.
Galaxy Nexus gets recovery images, for when your hacking joy turns to tears
Like extreme stunts, hacking can be rather thrilling. Still, there will always be freak accidents when things don't go as planned, and thankfully, Google has released a safety net for you Galaxy Nexus adrenaline junkies. Specific to the HSPA+ model, the recovery images include the bootloader, radio, and full set of system files. No word yet about whether Google will perform a similar act of generosity for the LTE version that's coming to Verizon Wireless. Naturally, hacking your device is likely to void the warranty, but hey, there needs to be at least some risk involved, right?
Emulate Lion's Versions in Microsoft Word
Microsoft Word does not support Lion's "Versions" feature yet, but there's no reason to panic. There are a few options that you can use to cobble together a work- around until the Mac BU team updates the Office suite. Also worth mentioning: although I am focusing on Microsoft Word, the same technique can be used in just about any word processing or text editing application. "Does the app provide any auto-save settings?" The first thing to check is whether the application that you are using offers any auto-save or auto-recover options, even if it doesn't support Versions specifically. Microsoft Word offers two auto-save options. To find them, launch Word, then go to Preferences -> Save and check the options shown below: The middle underlined option is the most important: it says to save auto-recover information every minute. I think the default is every 10 minutes, but a lot can change in 10 minutes. The top checkbox is optional, but creating a backup means that you have another way to recover if something goes wrong. Options never hurt. These backups are stored in the same directory as the original, and the filenames end in "~" which is a long-standing convention for backup file names. The third is also optional, but personally I prefer the older .doc format simply because it's more compatible with other non-Microsoft applications. The XML-based .docx format also got a bad rap previously for compatibility issues with Dropbox, although if you're running the current version of the cloud storage utility you shouldn't have any problems. (That said, .docx is the better format, not to mention the more modern format. I think of the ".doc or .docx?" choice sort of like choosing between .mp3 or .m4a: the newer formats have technical advantages, but not as many applications support them. The difference, of course, is that it's usually pretty simple to convert between .doc and .docx.) "Where does the app store files?" Some applications automatically store files in a certain folder structure, and you can't move them (at least not without getting into creating links, which may or may not work well). Text editors and word processors, however, generally let you choose where to store files you create; Office also has settings for default folders for saving and auto-recovery under Preferences -> File Locations: Note that setting the default for "Documents" does not mean that you can't change it for individual files later, it just tells Microsoft Office where to start when opening or saving new files. You can also change the location of the AutoRecover files. I put mine into ~/Dropbox/Backups/Microsoft Office/ because if the computer I'm on dies completely, I can access the data from any other Dropbox-connected account. Is this an unlikely scenario/edge case? Absolutely. Does it hurt to set it anyway? Nope. "But my application doesn't have those settings!" Check out Default Folder X which, as the name implies, can set the default folder for just about any application (plus other things). Dropbox No doubt you noticed that I suggested using Dropbox to save the files. That's not just because they are available online or on any iOS device. Dropbox also keeps every revision for the past 30 days. That means that every time you hit "Save," a separate version is saved on Dropbox. Browsing Dropbox revisions isn't as visually slick as using Versions on Lion. To view them, select the file in Finder, and then use the Dropbox icon on your Finder toolbar, or Control-click (right-click, or two-finger click) on the file and use the Dropbox contextual menu. That will launch the Dropbox website and show you a listing of all the versions, and give you a chance to download them (some file formats can even be previewed online). While Dropbox only saves 30 days' worth of revisions, Dropbox Pro users also have the option to add the Pack-Rat feature which will keep revisions indefinitely. With every save, you are creating an off-site backup of your latest work, so even if you only use one computer, Dropbox is the place to save your most important and most often changed files. "But what if I forget to press save? My app doesn't have any sort of auto-save functionality!" Don't fret if your app doesn't have auto-save; you can add it to any application very simply by using Keyboard Maestro. It's as simple as creating a macro which says "If I am using {insert application name here}, and there is a 'Save' button, press it every X seconds or minutes." I've created just such a rule for Microsoft Word here: This rule will only run when Microsoft Word is active and there is a menu option for "Save" (which will be disabled if you don't have any files open). If it does find the Save menu item, it will select it. (You could also tell it to press "⌘ + S" but I prefer selecting menu items to keyboard shortcuts.) With this rule you never have to worry about spending an hour on a Word document only to lose it all when the app crashed and you realized that you had forgotten to save it. If the file isn't saved when the Keyboard Maestro macro runs, it will prompt you to name the file. (There are other applications like Keyboard Maestro which support the same kind of features, but Keyboard Maestro is the one that I know and use. If you would recommend others, let us know in the comments.) Versions is great, but there's no need to wait for your app to support it Versions is a great addition to OS X, and I love not having to remember to save, but only a handful of applications support it at the present time. If you want to (or are required to) use another application, take a few minutes to check out your auto-save options. There are few things more frustrating than losing unsaved work, but the good news is that there are fewer and fewer reasons for that to ever happen.
Refresh Roundup: week of September 12, 2011
Your smartphone and / or tablet is just begging to get updated. From time to time, these mobile devices are blessed with maintenance refreshes, bug fixes, custom ROMs and anything in between, and so many of them are floating around that it's easy for a sizable chunk to get lost in the mix. To make sure they don't escape without notice, we've gathered every possible update, hack, and other miscellaneous tomfoolery from the last week and crammed them into one convenient roundup. If you find something available for your device, please give us a shout at tips at engadget dawt com and let us know. Enjoy! Official Android updates The HTC Merge on US Cellular can now be bumped up to Android 2.3.4. It appears to be a manual install, so visit here to download the file and learn exactly how to update your device. [via UnwiredView] HTC has added another device to its growing list of phones and tablets that now support the HTCDev bootloader unlock tool. [via PocketDroid] The LG Optimus S on Sprint is now on the receiving end of an OTA Gingerbread rollout. [via UnwiredView] Great news, Samsung Infuse 4G users: you're getting an update. The bad news: it's a maintenance fix, rather than a full-out Gingerbread upgrade. Still, it may be worth the download if you have the time or opportunity. [via AndroidCentral] Samsung has released the kernel source for the Epic 4G Touch. [via PocketNow] Sprint's certainly getting a lot of love this week, and we're not done yet: the Motorola Photon 4G is beginning to push out another smallish bug fix meant to curb WiFi issues experienced by a few users, and appears to be a gradual rollout. [via SprintFeed] The original Motorola Droid X is expected to receive a maintenance refresh as early as tomorrow, which is intended to resolve a widespread issue with the keyboard. If you're in this category, definitely keep a close eye out on this space. [via Droid-Life] We're hearing that the Droid 2 R2-D2 update to Gingerbread, which we originally reported on last week, is officially rolling out to eager fanboys and fangirls countrywide. [via AndroidCentral] Unofficial Android updates, custom ROMs and misc. hackery Those CyanogenMod7 builds for the HTC Sensation and EVO 3D we were talking about last week? They're now available. As extremely early builds, download and flash at your own risk. [via AndroidCentral] Since we're talking so much about HTC, here's one more thing: you can now grab a ROM for your HTC Desire HD that enables the beats audio technology. [via GSMArena and Android Community] A dev has been hard at work pulling various Motorola Atrix ROMs and porting them over to the Droid X2. The first one available is plain vanilla Android 2.3.4, if you're just not feeling up to using MotoBlur (aka the now-nameless Moto UI). [via Droid-Life] The initial build of the Motorola Droid Bionic bootstrap is available for install, which essentially will enable you to bootstrap your recovery and create backups on your device. Custom ROMs still aren't around for the Bionic yet (although early builds of CM7 began showing up this week), but the bootstrap is a big step toward achieving that goal. [via Droid-Life] Other platforms Symbian's Anna update is continuing to expand support to more countries, including Italy, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey. The refreshes for the US, Canada and Australia -- according to an email from Nokia -- is expected to arrive within the next two weeks. [via MyNokiaBlog] Refreshes we covered this week AT&T Windows Phone 7 devices to receive Mango this fall BlackBerry PlayBook to get OTA update next month that will offer native email, calendar
Build your own Lion install USB thumb drive for cheap
Why pay Apple $69.99 when you can build your own Lion install drive for the App Store purchase price of $29.99 -- plus the cost of an inexpensive thumb drive. Here's how to create a full install on a drive, not just the recovery disk that we recently posted about. You'll need a copy of the OS X Lion installer. If you saved a copy when you first installed Lion, great. If not, you'll need to re-download it from the Mac App Store. To do so, launch the App Store and option-click the Purchases tab. An "Install" button should appear next to Lion. Click it to re-download the installer. You can use this option-click-Purchases trick to re-download any purchase, not just Lion. Once the 3.74-GB installer finishes downloading, go to your Applications folder to find the installer itself. It is called Install Mac OS X Lion. Right-click (or Control-click) the installer and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual pop-up. A new Finder browser window opens, showing the normally hidden material inside the installer bundle. Navigate to Contents > SharedSupport. There you'll find a disk image called InstallESD.dmg. Open a new Finder window with Command-N (File > New Finder Window). Navigate to /Applications/Utilities and launch DiskUtility. Attach a thumb drive to your Mac that is at least 4GB 8GB in size. (Update: some readers say 4GB isn't enough. As you can see, I used a 16GB drive) Prepare it for use by creating a single HFS+ partition. Select the drive (e.g. SanDisk Ultra) in the left hand column. Drives are listed first with their partitions listed after them, each partition indented slightly. With this drive selected, click the Partition tab and choose Partition Layout > 1 Partition. Choose Format > Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Click the Options button at the bottom-right of the partition layout. Select GUID Partition Table. Click Apply. Disk Utility asks you to confirm. Click Partition. Wait as it unmounts, partitions, and remounts your disk. Next, select the new partition (Untitled 1 by default). Click the Restore tab. Click Install next to the source field. Drag InstallESD.dmg into the file-open window and click Open. Drag Untitled 1 from the left column to the destination field. Click Restore and agree to Erase the drive and replace it with the contents of InstallESD.dmg. You may have to authenticate as an administrator. Wait. It will take some time for the drive to be written. Once it's done, eject it, label it clearly, and put it away for a rainy day. Meanwhile, go out and spend the $40 you just saved wisely.
Debunk: Lion USB sticks are not yet available
Apple clearly considers its new App Store-based distribution model one of the biggest advances in Lion, and to the company's credit, we found the whole thing to be quite painless. But physical media devotees needn't worry too much -- the company quietly announced at launch that the latest version of OS X will also be available on a USB key, for the lofty price of $69 -- which, incidentally, still requires Snow Leopard, unlike what has been previously reported. Word hit today that the company has finally issued the flash drive version of the software, information gleaned from an internal document reportedly leaked by AppleCare. We have it on good authority, however, that the drives mentioned in the document are not, in fact, the aforementioned sticks. Rather, the "recovery media" discussed is actually a restoration tool for AppleCare employees, used to fix faulty systems. We hate to be the burster of bubbles, but it seems that the App Store-impaired will still have to wait until later this month to get their hands on the $70 Apple dongle.
Lion: Diving into your Recovery partition
I spent a good deal of the afternoon diving in where no sane person really wants to spend a lot of time -- in my Lion recovery partition. It's not hard to get there, and it's quite a curious place when you do. [For those commenters wondering about the use of photos rather than screenshots to illustrate this post, it's hard to take screenshots on a system where the boot volume is read-only. –Ed.] The Recovery volume is a small slice of your hard drive that gets partitioned off during your Lion install; it's not optional, because that's actually where the OS gets installed from. You can view the contents of the Recovery volume by mounting it with the command-line diskutil tool, as John Siracusa points out; the regular Disk Utility app is thoughtful enough to keep it hidden. To restart in recovery, reboot your computer and hold down Command-R after the chime (you can also use the traditional Option-key holddown, which will show all your bootable volumes including Recovery). Before long, the gray linen background appears and the Mac OS X Utilities window pops up. The OS X Recovery partition includes a number of built-in utilities to handle system recovery tasks. The Utilities window allows you to Restore from a Time Machine Backup Reinstall OS X Use Disk Utility to repair or erase your hard drives Browse with Safari to get online help. Choosing the Safari option opens a web browser that immediately takes you to a basic help page. This help page is stored locally on your recovery partition at the following link: file:///System/Installation/CDIS/Mac%20OS%20X%20Utilities.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/RecoveryInformation.html You are not limited to Apple pages, however. The reason I was able to get that link up there isn't because I wrote it down. I copied it to memory, and pointed Safari to Earthlink's web mail page and simply e-mailed it to myself. I had no problems accessing any of the (admittedly limited) pages I tested. From there, I explored the Mac OS X Utilities > Utilities menu. Located off the main help screen and in a windows sub-menu, you can manage your firmware password, test and fix connectivity issues or access the Terminal for command-line management. Of course, I had see what Terminal had to offer. Turns out that your entire file system mounts, if it can. You can navigate to your user folders and access any material located there. I did not try it out myself, but I imagine you could attach a USB drive of some kind and copy files over if you needed to. There is no authentication here, so it's also possibly a bit of a security hole for anyone with physical access to the system. (For those who are concerned about physical access, don't forget about FileVault and/or an Open Firmware password to keep things secure.) The Recovery boot volume is read-only, and has a very limited set of files and features. You're actually running from the system image stored in BaseSystem.dmg, which gets mounted by the startup executables inside the com.apple.recovery.boot directory. That doesn't mean you can't run Nethack from your recovery partition. Just make sure your install is set up to run completely on another drive -- which mine is. (Also, don't forget to re-compile it from scratch. The PPC version no longer works on Lion.) Once you're done exploring, boot your way back to your primary partition and let your Recovery partition rest -- hopefully for a long, long, long time.
Lion Recovery restores Mac system software without drives (Updated)
Today, Apple introduced Lion Recovery as part of its OS X Lion distribution. Built into Lion, Recovery allows you to get your Mac back up and running after a catastrophic failure. By holding down Command-R during startup, Lion automatically boots from its recovery partition rather than its primary day-to-day partition. The recovery partition allows you to run Disk Utility, to erase your primary drive, re-install a fresh copy of Lion or restore from Time Machine. It also offers a built-in Safari web browser so you can search for help information online before applying the recovery tools. Lion Recovery can handle hard drive failures as well using a feature called Internet Recovery. Built into new Macs, including the newly released mini and MacBook Air, this new hardware feature will download and start Lion Recovery over any available broadband connection. Mac OS X has long had the ability to boot from a remote disk image via NetBoot, and restore the operating system via NetInstall (both based on the legacy bootp protocol, long present in NextStep and BSD). It looks like the new Macs extend NetBoot to the wide, wide Internet -- but Apple's write-up is pretty lean for the moment. Lion Recovery and Internet Recovery make physical install discs and dongles obsolete, allowing computers to restore themselves without having to hunt for extra equipment. [Updated to clarify that NetBoot is the likely underlying tech.]