I’m pleased to find that even after 10 years of Mac OS X, and over 20 years of using the Mac, but I can still be surprised by the small touches. This last month I discovered a couple of little features of the Mac that make using it ever so slightly nicer. None of these features are grand, sweeping changes to the way I use my computer, but each improves my life ever so slightly.
The first feature I uncovered this month involves printing in Preview. I often use LaTeX
With the new year and new operating system install on my mac, I’ve finally gotten serious about backups (again). After a few years of essentially no backups for my day-to-day system, Apple has inspired me by making constant backups simple with Time Machine.
You can read about Time Machine all over the Net, so I won’t waste time explaining why it’s so simple, but I will point out that the current price of hard drives and blank DVDs are so cheap, tape backups seems like a completely foreign concept. I’m currently using 750GB of disk to backup my 200GB notebook hard drive. If this seems like massive overkill, it’s because it is. In my defense the total cost of all this disk (in two external cases) was $270. One disk is a 500GB External with USB2/Firewire/ESATA interfaces, this drive is my Time Machine backup. I expect that there’s months of incremental backup space using this drive. The other is a USB2 bus-powered 2.5″ 250GB drive, that is a bootable clone of my internal drive; meant as an emergency recovery disk (especially while traveling). I’m using Carbon Copy Cloner to populate the latter, since it appears this functionality isn’t supported by Time Machine. Unfortunately, I’ll need to manually hook-up an sync the bootable clone, but this isn’t too bad since it appears that that the new versions of CCC supports synchronization well.
I also took the liberty of burning a duplicate of my Leopard install disk, and sticking it into the liner of my laptop case. I shouldn’t need it as long as the clone drive is with me, but I could have bailed out at least one other Mac owner at a conference last year had I had it with me.
While all of my friends using RAID 1 on their systems have been extolling this idea for years; mirroring isn’t a backup strategy (just ask anyone with Quickbooks).
I’ve been cycling for years, and over time I’ve become a pretty decent wrench as well as an avid fan of vintage cycling gear. Over the years I’ve seen multiple fads, bad ideas, and misconceptions float among novice cyclists. Inevitably, these people have a bad experience on their bike and end up parking it in a garage collecting dust. While I appreciate the occasional yard-sale bargain that results, I’d rather see more people on bicycles and fewer in cars. So here’s a couple of cycling myths I hear over and over…
The problem is that soft seats aren’t comfortable. In fact softer saddles cause more pain. The material of a gel saddle spreads the rider’s weight uniformly across all the
I’m a tiny bit of a wristwatch fan, and I have a couple of decent watches. This has made Kim a little unhappy, and not just because it’s one more thing I can collect (though that’s an issue too). It’s that there doesn’t seem to be much selection of “cool” watches for women.
By “cool”, Kim means self-winding watches, and particularly skeleton-ized watches with visible movements. She occasionally hunts for them on Amazon, but doesn’t find watches meeting her aesthetic (and financial) requirements. It took some doing, but I managed to find a (discontinued) watch that fit the bill (pictured above). After a lot of searching on eBay and paying really close to retail price, I snagged one used. Kim’s got her “cool” watch at last. That particular model is from Kenneth Cole, but I suspect it’s a version of a Chinese watch from Seagull.
During the search I came across a terrible site for those (like me) who love to shop for watches. If you have a hankering to kill some time staring at different ways to blow up a bank account, check out Watch Recon.
I’ve been getting some older games working again courtesy of Boxer. Boxer allows modern Macs to run games from the DOS era with a minimum of fuss. I happen to have a few programs left over from that era since some mac games included the DOS versions, and some I just bought for my (infrequent) DOS systems.
Mostly, I’ve moved over some adventure games from Legend Entertainment and Infocom, and the Pro Pinball series from Cunning Development. Timeshock and the Web both worked flawlessly, but Pro Pinball: Big Race USA needed a little tweaking. Specifically, the DOSBOX configuration needed to have the abstract volume name set and the amount of memory had to be raised. Here’s what the DOSBox Preferences.conf file looks like:
[cpu]
core=dynamic
[dosbox]
memsize=31
[autoexec]
ABSTRACT Pro_Pinball_3
With all the evictions of the Occupy movement lately, I was thinking about the Riot Act. While I have occasionally been “read the Riot Act”, I had never actually read the Riot Act. To wit:
Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!
(Courtesy of Wikipedia)
So I just started up my Xbox 360 for the first time in 6 months to try out the new Metro UI and media features. First stop, the Netflix app. After downloading the app and starting it up, I get told I need an Xbox Live Gold
Now I have a free XBL Silver account which is free, but I don’t play enough multi-player games to justify $60/yr. for a Gold account. I do currently spend $8/mo. for Netflix streaming — now Microsoft wants me to pay for Gold access just to get at content I already pay for.
To be clear:
I paid for the Xbox 360.
I pay for Netflix.
I pay for my broadband connectivity.
So all I want is for Microsoft to let me use the app (that’s already on my Xbox) to use the things I’ve already paid for. For this they want $50 each and every year (subject to price increases).
Fail.
For the record you can buy a Roku
Our living room as bike parking lot. Notice that we have 6 bikes in the photo and only 4 family members (and that’s not even counting the 3 more at my house). That little purple bike in the foreground needs to go, and I have one of the bikes at my place up on Craigslist now.
The coming days should bring some updates to the blog. Bicycles are big in our house at the moment, so I’m going to start posting the related household news.
Both kids received bicycles for their birthdays this year. Much happiness and a bunch of riding ensued. This has naturally led to more riding for Kim and me. in an effort to avoid paying for a campus parking permit, Kim has already been riding to work most days. So, I just needed to hop on my bike to make it a family affair.
After a few evening rides in the College Park area, we took a longish (10 mile) ride in Rock Creek Park — from Peirce Mill to Grubb Road, and back. At the mid-point of our ride, we enjoyed a nice Sunday brunch at the Daily Dish. The ride was a relative success, and we plan on trying to enjoy a couple more such outings while the weather holds.