If, for some rea­son, you decide to pull a key off your Mac­Book (or in my case, Black­Book) key­board and can’t fig­ure out how to put it back on, there’s a great lit­tle walk-thru on flickr. Here’s a link to the set or you can watch the slideshow below.

By the way, there’s plenty of good rea­sons to pull a key off your key­board (clean­ing being one of them). If you just pull it off because you’re want­ing to avoid doing other work, just look at the pic­tures below instead. It’ll save you a lot of hassle.

Chances are you’ve seen the news about the iPhone 3.0 Soft­ware Update that Apple recently released. For iPhone users, it’s a free upgrade so it isn’t really a ques­tion of whether it would be worth it — free is free!

For iPod touch users though, due to the way Apple does their books on the iPod touchs, it’s a $9.95US upgrade. Which begs the ques­tion — is it worth it to upgrade your iPod touch to iPhone 3.0?

Unless you just bought your ipod touch you prob­a­bly don’t already have the iPhone 3.0 installed but it might worth it to dou­ble check. To find out which ver­sion you have:

• Tap the set­tings icon
• Tap Gen­eral
• Tap About to see the ver­sion number

Apple lists the major new fea­tures for iPod touch users as:

• Buy Movies, TV Shows, and Audio­books via Wi-Fi
• Stereo Blue­tooth (only for 2nd gen­er­a­tion iPod touch — to tell if you have a 2nd gen or not, you can eas­ily tell by whether your iPod touch has a speaker built in or not. If you can’t hear any­thing from your iPod with­out head­phones plugged in, you’ve got a 1st gen iPod touch)
• Peer to Peer Gam­ing (also only for 2nd gen iPod touch)
• Land­scape Keyboard
• Spot­light Search
• Cut, Copy & Paste

There’s a few other upgrades worth men­tion­ing as well includ­ing parental con­trols, auto­matic wi-fi login, iTunes store account cre­ation, new lan­guages, push noti­fi­ca­tions, third party acces­sories, Safari improve­ments, sync notes and shake to shuffle.

After ini­tially installing the update on my 1st gen iPod touch I wasn’t that impressed with every­thing to think it was actu­ally worth it. Cut/copy/paste is nice, but not a fea­ture I’d use a lot. Same thing with the land­scape key­board. The push noti­fi­ca­tions and third party acces­sories will be nice, once software/hardware devel­op­ers start sup­port­ing them but as of now there isn’t a lot that are — though that’s sure to change in the com­ing months.

The Safari improve­ments are nice and it’s def­i­nitely a quicker browser, but it’s not wouldn’t be enough for me to war­rant an upgrade either. I knew I’d like the fact that the Notes app would finally sync to Mail.app but it also wasn’t a deal maker/breaker for me.

So my ini­tial impres­sion was that I wouldn’t really rec­om­mend it to folks at this point. If $10 could be bet­ter spent else­where, then do so.

After hav­ing used it for a cou­ple weeks though, I think I’ve changed my thoughts. The Notes sync­ing has become some­thing I’m using much more (though to be hon­est, it should have been there from the begin­ning). Same goes for the land­scape key­board — it’s nice to have but not some­thing that should have taken until ver­sion 3 to arrive, in my opin­ion. Spot­light search is also a very handy tool to find information/apps on your iPod touch — I just need to remem­ber to use it more often instead of man­u­ally try­ing to find it.

At this point I can say that I’d rec­om­mend upgrad­ing. Besides the few major fea­tures, the behind the scenes improvements/optimizations are well worth the $10 price. If you think of the money you’d spend on a Mac OS or, heaven for­bid, a Win­dows OS upgrade it’s a pretty cheap OS upgrade. Once more apps start mak­ing use of push noti­fi­ca­tions and the peer-to-peer con­nec­tiv­ity (con­nect­ing to another 2nd gen iPod touch or iPhone), it will be well worth it.

Click here to visit Apple’s iPod touch soft­ware update page for more information.

What do you think? Will you (or did you) upgrade your iPod touch?

Direct link

Vanessa asks: I really need to get some back up Hard Drive. I’ve heard I need at least 3 HDDs. is that what I use? Also what brand or mem­ory space do you think is required?

On a mac the best back up is a exter­nal firewire HD and then set­ting up time machine. Time machine is Leopard’s built in backup solu­tion and you will need to have Mac OS 10.5 installed to use it. When they say you need 3, they are talk­ing about hav­ing 3 dupli­cates of the data you want to backup. 1 on local machine + 2 Backup HD’s = 3 HDs.

If you want that much stor­age I would rec­om­mend some­thing like the WD mybook mir­ror edi­tion. Like this one above, which is avail­able at Costco for $329. While it may seem like way too much HD space, if you have alot of movie, pic­tures or music you will find a way to fill it up fast. Plus if you use the “Mir­rored” mode you will actu­ally only have 1TB of stor­age as the device had 2 HD’s inside and when you set it up it will mir­ror the dri­ves. This is how peo­ple get the 3 HD’s backup. If one of the dri­ves dies inside the backup the other one still has every­thing on it and you are fine.

How­ever you could go the cheaper route and just buy an exter­nal HD with one HD and you would still be okay. Any­thing bet­ter than no backup is better.

The last option, which I am cur­rently using at both work and home, is to buy an Apple Time Capsule.

While you are only get­ting 1 HD for backup pur­poses, the unit also func­tions as your wire­less router at the new stan­dard “N” speed. It also has a USB port to add a wire­less printer or expand the HDD space with another exter­nal unit. The ben­e­fit you get from back­ing up to this unit is that you never have to con­nect a devise to your mac­book or iMac as it is done wire­lessly. In the past I had been back­ing up with a reg­u­lar USB exter­nal HDD, how­ever, some­times I would go 10–20 days before I would remem­ber to backup. While this never really got me into major trou­ble, I did learn my les­son when a HDD recently died and I almost lost data that would have been backed up, had I con­nected my exter­nal drive. Luck­ily I was able to res­cue the needed files. The Apple Time Cap­sule comes in a 500GB, and 1TB size and cost $329 and $529 respec­tively. How­ever, you can find them cheaper from the Apple Refur­bished Store.