Reading really is fundamental. I saw a post on Lifehacker about Syncplicity finally opening their beta to Mac users, and so, having never heard of this software, I read on. The post mentioned something about file sharing, and I was intrigued. I don’t really do the whole file-sharing thing anymore, and I think a lot of other people have moved away from it, too, so I was interested in what Lifehacker recommended.

I downloaded the program, and was initially confused as to how it worked. Where was the interfact? How could I see what other people were offering? Since it was a private beta, I was willing to be a little more trusting and was hoping that I’d find some good and/or rare music. So I read the guide on how to get started, but still wasn’t seeing anything relevant to file-sharing. I went back to Lifehacker to reread the post, and lo and behold, it’s a file SYNCing program, to sync files and content across two (free) or more (paid subscription) computers.

I’m such a dummy. I can’t believe I misread that so many times. If I’d been thinking, which I clearly wasn’t even the program’s name would have tipped me off.

And, just having checked, it seems that MOST of my multitouch gestures are not working with Opera. The only thing that works right off the bat is navigating up and down a page. Bummer.

Windows 7? On my PC? It’s less likely than you think!

Because it was so easy to put Windows 7 on my MacBook, I was sure that it would be at least as simple to do so on my Gateway pc. I mean, Gateways are native Microsoft environments, so what could possibly be so difficult, right? WRONG. It turns out that Vista sucks every bit as much as you may have heard, and so, instead of being able to partition my hard drive and make space for Windows 7, I have just spent large chunks of the last three days figuring out how to partition my hard drive. I had 113 GB of free space on the drive, and Vista said that a grand total of 98 MB of that was available to be partitioned.

So what was the problem? Vista has built-in software to do partition drives, but the way that it stores system files means that all my free space is basically worthless. Vista’s default storage area for system files is at the very end of the hard drive, which means that you can’t lop off any part of the drive until you’ve moved those system files further in. It’s not hard to fix, but you can’t do it with tools provided within Vista.

Here’s the tutorial that I used to figure out what to do. Some notes: I used PerfectDisk2008 with no problem (there are many versions of PerfectDisk to choose from when you get to that web site). When you’ve finished the regular defrags, choose the System Files option in PerfectDisk. This will require a restart of your system, but took less than 5 minutes on my system. I went from seeing 3 GB of space (after I deleted my pagefile) to over 100 GB.

I’m having some of the same trackpad issues with Windows 7 on my MacBook that others have had, which is one of the reasons I wanted to try Windows 7 on my pc laptop. I’ll use it for a couple of days and then give my thoughts on both experiences.

Just how big a nerd am I?

I dual-booted OS X and Windows 7, just to see if I could.

Windows 7 is pretty interesting so far, but I finished the install and played with the whole setup for about 20 minutes before I had to go to bed. Will explore more later.

How to Use Multiclutch

I think I’ve written before about my love for MultiClutch, but if I didn’t, here goes: I LOVE MULTICLUTCH. It’s a smart piece of software that I am finding invaluable. The only thing is, it doesn’t really come with instructions, and most of the places where I’ve seen it referenced assume that you will know exactly how to use it. This wasn’t the case with me, and maybe it’s not for everybody else, either. I saw that an Engadget reader posted a MultiClutch question in one of the Mac threads there, so I’m going to use his (or her) question as a way to give people an idea of how you would use MultiClutch on further thought, I think that the action requested is impossible, but since I spent all this time explaining how to use MultiClutch, I’ll post the following anyway. I’ll use Firefox as an example.

How to Set Up and Use MultiClutch

1) Open System Preferences and bring up Multiclutch.
2) Note that on the left side of the MultiClutch window, where it says Application, there are Plus and Minus signs on the bottom. Click on the Plus sign, and add Firefox to your Application list.
3) For the sake of this example, let’s say that we want to go to the previous tab when we rotate to the left. On the right side of the window, where it says Gesture, choose “Rotate Left”. Once you’ve done that, go to the Key Command part of that section, where it shows a generic key combination. Click in that box so that you can edit, and then actually type out the keyboard combination that you would normally use to accomplish your desired action in Firefox (CTRL SHIFT TAB). The box should now show the correct key combination in symbol form. Once you’ve done that, close the program, and the next time you open Firefox, that gesture will perform that action.

I will say that I think the closing program thing may only be necessary when configuring non-native programs, because I didn’t have to close Safari to get it to register the gestures I programmed. I hope this helps somebody!