— bikes and things

Had to replace the hard drive in Emma’s laptop today. A rather involved process to be honest and kind of unsettling seeing all of the guts lying on the coffee table. Anyway, it seems to work when I screwed it all back together. Need to get a RAM upgrade to install 10.6 though which is annoying.

Game Over, originally uploaded by Andy*Matthews.

I love the retro games that are coming to the iPhone. Had to get the tube to work this morning and it was made all the better by a couple of levels of Sonic! Last time I remember playing this was on a friends Megadrive and I was probably 12 or 13.

With a few friends switching to Macs I’ve been meaning to put together a list of ‘essential software’ together for a while and I guess this is as good a place as any. Not sure how I’ll group them. I may just list them all. I won’t include things that are installed by default on 10.5 just additional apps I’ve been using. There’s 10 applications here and I may well add to this list in the future.

1. MarsEdit
$30. Blog posting software from Red Sweater software. Allows you to type all your pointless musings from the comfort of your own Mac at home before uploading to your site. Also integrates with flickr. One of my favourite and most useful bits of software. Also the developer is very friendly and helpful. I’ve had questions answered with an hour on email. Mac only.

2. Handbrake
Open Source [free] but worth donating. DVD ripping software which turns your DVD’s in to nice 2-4gig sized Quicktime files for putting on your iPod, iPhone etc or playing in FrontRow or on your machine. I used to have a library of lots of films I had ripped. This was really good when I had the iMac as I would just watch films before going to bed. Comes in Mac, Windows and Linux versions.

3. Synergy
€5. A simple set of controls to control iTunes and display album art and song details when a track starts playing. Essential. Saves flicking between applications. Mac only.

4. GarageSale
€30. A great application that allows you to manage, design and upload applications offline and upload them to ebay without using the painful process on the site. It includes a series of excellent templates for use. Feels a bit like iPhoto in it’s layout and so useful. Also links with your photos and will host your images for you if required. Mac only.

5. GarageBuy
Free. From the same developers as GarageSale. Allows you to search ebay and save searches on ebay without actually visiting the site. You can also add watched items and even bid directly from within the application. Mac only.

6. iStat Menu
Free but worth donating. Gives you visual feedback about memory usage, hard drives, processor usage etc and completely customisable. Useful to see what process has brought your machine to a grind.

7. Mail.appetizer
Free but worth donating. Gives a preview of emails that come in to Mail in a semi transparent window. You can also delete messages or mark them as read without switching to Mail. Mac only.

8. Growl
Free. “A system wide notifications system”. A number of applications support this and send information to a transparent window. Hard to explain but very useful.

9. Transmit
$30. Simply the best FTP client for OS X. Mac only.

10. Time Machine
Ok, so it comes included with OS X 10.5 and I said I wouldn’t include items in OS X but this really is essential. See this post for more details. Mac only obviously.

In all the years I’ve been using computers for day to day work [since around 97-98 when I started uni] I’ve never had to do a full backup of a system after a catastrophic failure. By catastrophic I mean water in my MacBook…

So I was a little worried that I’d lost everything! My laptop has all my portfolio of work on which essential for me gaining employment and also all my Part 3 work, not to mention all my music and photos.

Since upgrading to Mac OS 10.5 I’ve been using a program called Time Machine to back up which comes as part of OS X on the Mac. I’d never had to test how good it is and kind of hoped that it would just work when I needed it to. I’ve never needed to recover an individual file either as I’m usually careful about what I delete.

My new MacBook arrived from Amazon yesterday and as soon as I got it home I rebooted from the CD and selected restore from Time Machine Backup. An hour or so later my laptop was exactly as it was the day before the flood! Needless to say I am very impressed!