Mac Mode

A list of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts from Apple.com. How many do you know?

My buddy darkmoon from LUX.ET.UMBRA points to Clonetool which is donationware that clones your hard drive so you can easily move your system. Then again, if I’m upgrading to an Intel Core Mac, wouldn’t I just want to backup the important files/programs I use on the Mac? There aren’t that many apps I’ll be moving to my next Mac when I buy one. When will that be? Perhaps next year. The eMac, though getting a bit old, works good for what I’ve been using it for to date.

Weighing in at 39.8 MB the most recent update of Mac OS X (PowerPC) is available if you do a software update.

Mine is running now.

Doing some maintenance on the Mac today:

- implemented a backup system to a partitioned network drive to share with Windows and Mac. I formatted the partition as FAT32 and used Windows File Sharing with permissions set for read/write. Works great, although there is only 32GB of space for backup, that should be plenty for my Mac. I have been concerned about this for a long time because I only have one Mac and if it goes down, I’d lose my work.
- setup a backup automator action that will copy/move my important files from the Mac to the backup network drive. Am also considering backing up some of the files to remote location by using the service Mozy. It’s free for up to 2GB.
- unchecked/disabled all the widges I wasn’t using. The only two I’m using at the moment are SysStat and EpochTimeConverter
- systat alerted me to a memory problem with VshieldCheck which is fallout from Virex. I Googled the problem and found O’Reilly had recommended uninstalling Virex clear back in May 2005. Woohoo, the eMac is cooking now!

Any other Mac system tweaks I should setup?

I haven’t done much with Spotlight nor Del.icio.us, but the following combination looks handy, via Download Squad:

[an] addon for Mac OS X that lets you search your del.icio.us bookmarks with Spotlight. It updates itself from your bookmarks every 30 minutes and imports URLs, titles, descriptions, and tags. It’s open source, too.

My current tagging/bookmarking tool of choice is MyWeb, also owned by Yahoo.

It’s that update time again, including Mac OS X 10.4.4. Should see a screen something like this, if you haven’t already:

This is pretty neat, another feature in the System Preferences that I didn’t know about: how to setup stealth mode (thanks Pei). BTW, this is one of the best designed Mac blogspot hosted blogs I’ve seen. Pei has a custom Macnify Dashboard Widget too. I’ll be back.

Just checked “Software Update” and there was the 10.4.3 upgrade waiting:

Also, today marks my first day without .Mac. I decided to let that account go. Would rather use that $109 USD to go towards an iSight camera or perhaps some other Mac software. I do miss having the .Mac email address and a few of the other perks, but couldn’t justify the expense otherwise.

One neat thing I noticed in the Mail client on Mac is that I could just uncheck the .Mac email address as “enabled” effectively disabling it, so I wouldn’t lose all my settings.

Think Secret has details on the upcoming Mac OS X 10.4.3 upgrade:

… will weigh in at around 100MB and include more than 550 fixes and improvements, although unconfirmed reports have pegged this number at more than 1,000 when smaller, undocumented changes are included in the count. The latest seed added tweaks to CoreGraphics, CoreImage, and OpenGL, as well as iChat and WebKit, among other improvements.

The articles says that this update could be available within a few days.

Last night I installed the first released Tiger 10.4.1 patch. The process went smoothly and took only a few minutes. The update file was just under 20 MB.

(BTW, my panicked look is just acting)

With Tiger, you can now press F12 to toggle on/off access and download new widgets for a wide variety of tasks.

Widgets currently available include: clocks, stock ticker, games, websafe color picker, post entry to del.icio.us (shown above), iTunes integration, blogging, RSS readers and much more. Those with .Mac accounts will be able to download exclusive widgets, but that feature is in “coming soon” status.

Developers can learn how to create widgets here.

Other sites with widgets: DashboardWidgets.com

tags: Tiger, OSX, dashboard, widgets

One of the first things I wanted to check out was the new RSS features in Safari. Most these feeds are major news organizations. I took screenshots of all of them below.

ABC News (6), Apple Hot News, Apple Press Releases, BBC (4), CBS Marketwatch, CNET News (3), CNN/Money (3), ESPN, eWEEK (2), Fast Company, HowStuffWorks, Inc.com

Inside Mac Games, iTunes (7), Mac OS X Downloads, MacCentral (3), MacWorld reviews, Netflix (2), New Mac OS X Products, O’Reilly Network, Red Herring, RollingStone, Slashdot, The Motley Fool, The New York Times (13)

Time (3), VersionTracker Mac OS X, Washington Post (6), Wired (4), Yahoo(6).

Not a single blogger listed as far as I could see.

tags: Tiger, Mac, OSX, RSS, Safari

At the same time I bought Tiger ($129 USD), I bought the Peachpit Press book Mac OS X Tiger by Maria Langer. 700 pages for $24.99, now that’s a nice price!

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you already own a DVD drive), Tiger comes on DVD format, so I needed to buy the Lacie external DVD+R drive ($179) with firewire connection. It comes with Toast 6 Titanium ($100 value), so that made the trip to the Apple store and DVD purchase more pleasant.

Installation of Tiger was a snap. Here are my notes:

4:10pm start installation
1) open box (cutting the seal):

2) evaluate contents

3) put Tiger install disc in the drive

4) Tiger will start and display a screen that the process is underway. The entire installation would take 46 minutes from start to finish.

4:46pm reboot
4:53pm startup assistant video starts playing
4:56pm END installation
—————————–
46 minutes upgrade (from OS X 10.3) time on eMac

import mail (took 10 seconds)
Finder was originally frozen, so needed to restart. This was the only glitch I experienced. Now onto checking out those 200+ new Tiger features!

I’m trying out GIMPshop .2b for working with the pictures I took and imported with iPhoto.

GIMPShop is a hack of the open-source photo editor, the Gimp, to make it look and act very much like Photoshop.

Soon, very soon the Tiger stuff is going to start being posted. I’ve been playing around with some of the new Tiger features.

I’m working on a couple Tiger-related posts, so stay tuned for lots of what’s underneath the hood of Tiger, but in the meantime I’m sitting here thinking about the name of this blog. I don’t like it.

Seems like the word “muse” and its derivatives has become a blog name cliche. Also I need to upgrade this blog to the newest version of Wordpress (1.5x). Lastly, this blog layout doesn’t look good in Internet Explorer. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a Mac blog, so who cares? Well the 70% of internet Explorer users do, I suppose. So I want to fix this too with a different design that is more IE-friendly.

So what would be good names to change for this blog?

- Mac Minutes from a Windows User
- Mac Mania from a Windows User
- Mac Attack from a Windows User
- Big Mac Coverage from a Windows User - while this one sounds catchy, McDonald’s may not like it)

Your name change suggestions?

Know I’ve been a little quiet on the Mac front for awhile, but this weekend especially I expect I’ll be increasing the Mac blogging output with the release of Tiger OS X 10.4 which comes out tomorrow ($129).

Apple is rolling out a World Premiere at your local Apple store from 6pm - Midnight. Check out the 200+ new features.