Not the kind of time machine I meant

Oh allergies. Why must you ruin my Thursday?

My Time Machine backup drive died suddenly last week. I don’t know if it was age (two years) or the heat, but it just stopped working in the middle of the day, and wouldn’t come back on. I got a 1.5 TB drive (Newegg’s having a sale on external HDs, if anybody is interested), and made my previous backup drive into my new Time Machine. I was searching online to see what other people do when their time machine goes kaput. The search string “Time Machine failed” wasn’t very promising, so I switched to “Time Machine Died.”

I love (LOVE!) how the first result is some “article” on figuring out whether it’s possible to travel to the past and, say, shoot and kill your grandfather. Ooo-kay. It’s a little “how is babby formed,” but kind of a fun way to waste a couple of minutes.

I still haven’t figured out what the deal is with my dead dead HD, but I’ll worry about that later. I’m home sick today, so I think I’m going to take some allergy meds, motrin, and sleep til I know no more.

Much better

Just days after switching to Firefox 3.1 beta 2 and losing the functionality of some of my add-ons, 3.0.7, and official update, was released. Out of curiosity, I switched to it. I think it may be a little slower, but all of my extensions work again. As that chick on the OC said, God doesn’t give with both hands, right?

This is why I have three browsers

I was thinking of Neil LaBute the other day, and then last night I saw a poster for Reasons to be Pretty, his new play. I was like, SCORE! The poster had the following URL on it: http://www.doesthisplaymakemelookfat.com. I went to the web site today using Firefox, which I recently made my default browser. The site opened, but I saw nothing. I tried it in Safari, and behold, the nothingness became stuff. So now I know more about the play, which is something (I guess).

Then I wanted to try out Safari 4 beta, to see whether it can live up to the claims made by Apple. The download page on the Apple web site didn’t work for me in Firefox (0 for 2 today) or Safari (1 for 2), but it did work in Opera 10 alpha, which I think is odd. I just finished the install and am about to restart, and once I’ve messed around with it for a bit, I’ll post my impressions. I guess, actually, that I should go get Firefox 3.1 beta 2 while I’m at it.

All things Opera

The last time I thought that Opera was working with Multi-Touch/Multiclutch gestures, I closed it down completely (carrying over no windows between sessions), only to find that I had been mistaken. Again. I was so disappointed that I didn’t open the program for over a week. I hear that lots of Mac users don’t like Safari, but I’m finding that it suits my needs pretty nicely (although I do still also use Firefox on occasion).

Today, though, I wanted to use a fresh browser to check for airfare, and didn’t feel like going through and deleting all of my travel-related cookies from Safari and Firefox. I opened Opera, and was informed that new build was fixed. I downloaded it, and HUZZAH!! It does work with Multi-touch gestures. Immediately, with no dumb luck involved. Unfortunately, my bookmarks didn’t make it from one version to the next, but that was easy enough to remedy. It seems like such a stupid thing to dump a browser over, but I’m so used to this now, that I hate maneuvering without my gestures, and I think my windows laptop is little more than a lapwarmer.

Speaking of opera, I just realized that I didn’t speak about my trip to see Aida last week. Eyes are floating shut, more on that later.

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.

Opera 10 Alpha – Peregrine

I’ve been using Opera 10 Alpha since it was released earlier this month. I have always liked the Opera web browsers, but it never made sense to me to pay for a program when there were free alternatives that worked as well, if not better, most of the time (first Netscape, then Firefox; I have never considered IE to be better than Opera). But when I heard of the new release, I decided to give it a try. It has been a few years since I’ve used Opera on a computer, but I’ve enjoyed using Opera mini on my last few cell phones.

I know that this is an alpha release, and therefore should not be assumed to be without flaws, and I have to say that, for the most part, I am really impressed by this release. Opera 10 is extremely fast and responsive, and renders pages at least as quickly as Safari and Firefox 3. I don’t care much about the way a program looks, as long as it works, but the placement of pretty much everything makes sense, and for those who don’t like the look of this interface, I believe that skins are available.

I tried Opera’s built-in mail module to access my primary gmail account, and I am not impressed. I’m giving it time to learn and using the filters provided, but so far, too much mail from my spam folder is ending up in my inbox. You can edit rules, but none of the rules allow me to filter by folder location, which would make removing spam from my inbox here a snap. So that’s not good. I only wanted to use the mailbox feature to see what it’s like, and as there are more than enough excellent desktop programs for accessing webmail, I don’t expect to make Opera my default gmail viewer any time soon.

I’ve grown so used to using Multiclutch, and am really sad that it doesn’t work consistently in Opera 10. It never works immediately upon opening the browser. Then, once I do something, the gestures I’ve programmed work like a charm – I just don’t know what that something is, so I can’t do it sooner in my Opera sessions. In terms of Multiclutch, I’ve just gotten this browser where I want it, and once I get the gestures going again, I’m not going to ever clear this session!

In all, I’m really enjoying trying different browsers on OS X. I think that Firefox has actually become the third place finisher in terms of my browser usage on this computer. Safari is pretty neat, and with the addition of Saft, as close to the perfect browser as I’m likely to experience. I stupidly left Saft in kiosk mode for about a week and could not for the life of me figure out where I’d gone wrong, but once I figured it out (I’m slow, what can I say), it was all smooth sailing again! I am even going to install Opera 10 on my Windows laptop, to see what I think of it there. I’ve used Safari on that computer, and have no desire to install it again, so I guess that the worst that Firefox can do on my Gateway is come in second.

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!

Be still, my Mac-loving heart

So I’m a bit of a fangirl already, and I’ve only had my computer since Friday. That’s right, it got here early. From Shanghai to New Jersey in two(ish, given the extreme time differences) days. Apple keeps going up higher and higher in my book. The learning curve exists, but this system is so LOGICAL, that honestly, after puzzling things out for a bit, you can definitely figure it out yourself.

Case in point: I kept reading about MultiClutch, a piece of software that allows you to use the new trackpad gestures that a built into this generation of MacBooks (and previous gens of MacBooks Air and Pro) and decided to get it. I already like this feature of the MacBook, and wanted to import it to Firefox, the application that I use most frequently. The problem is, MultiClutch came with no instructions. Once installed, it plopped itself in my System Preferences folder and sat there, silently mocking me. Every time I tried to add a gesture, it was assigned the same keystroke combination, which didn’t make any sense to me. How could everything be the product of Command-H? It took a couple of hours of leaving the conundrum simmering on the back burners of my mind, but then I had a DUH moment and realized that there had to be a way to edit the keystroke combo for each gesture. I doubleclicked (won’t give up that one) in that section of the line, and sure enough, it worked! I was able to enter an existing keystroke combination and give the expressed action that keystroke’s functionality. Rock! On!

I’m loving how quickly I was able to transfer all of my songs and playlists from my iPod to my Mac, and how painless it was to then sync said iPod to this MacBook. This was always a particular nightmare on my Windows PCs.

Touching this computer is heaven, it’s smart, it’s stylish, it’s so freaking good-looking that I keep waiting for somebody from Apple to come to my house and demand to have it back.

Plus, I already got geek love from a guy who found out that I own a Mac. Silly, but fun.

Sweet!

My new computer arrived today, three days ahead of schedule. It’s so awesome I can hardly stand it!! I haven’t even done too much exploration, but this machine is so quick, it’s insane. It was no hassle to set up my network, connect to the internet, or set up my programs. Plus, I’m using my same network connection as always, and it’s seriously about 6 times faster than my PC.

Gone over to the dark side

Did I tell y’all that I bought a Mac the other day? No, of course not, because I haven’t really been updating the way I should. Moving on…I have wanted an Apple forever, but couldn’t justify buying one. Well, that’s all changed. I saw the new generation of MacBooks, and just knew that I had to have one. They’re so pretty, and so well-constructed. How can you not love a computer that is made out of a solid block of aluminum? Not possible, my friend.

I ordered the 2.4GHz MacBook on Monday morning while processing loans (much to the amazement of my coworker, who does not understand my compartmentalization skills at all), and added a printer, along with a larger hard drive. The printer wasn’t something that I actually needed (and neither was the computer, obviously), but there was a rebate of $100, and it seemed silly not to get something that I would have to buy in a few months anyway when I finally move into my own apartment. The very very very nice guy from the Apple call center (what up, Arnie???) told me that I could process the rebate as soon as I got the printer by going to apple.com/promo, filling out the form, and entering the serial number from the box. Except: wrong!

I really needn’t have waited at all, because the form did not require any information that I didn’t know already when I placed my order. The whole thing took like 37 seconds, and 25 of those were spent entering my name and address. I didn’t even need to put in the serial number, which means I lugged this ridiculously light box to my room for no freaking reason at all, except to admire my adorable, wireless printer (which my dad is already lusting after). Even if the delay had been necessary, it wouldn’t have been very long, as the printer arrived the next day (the computer is coming from Shanghai, so I won’t see that baby until Monday morning). I know it’s a cult, but glory be, I am happy to have finally joined the ranks of blithely dismissive Apple fangirls who simply do not understand why Windows users put up with all the hassle. Thanks, Apple!!