Omega Point

Catherine’s Guide to Backups, Part 1

So there I was at Best Buy, finally tak­ing care of that “back­ups” busi­ness.¹

Since Apple added their super-convenient Time Machine app to Mac OS X 10.5 Leop­ard, I’d been mean­ing to get around to using it. A year later, I bought a sim­ple exter­nal USB drive, a West­ern Dig­i­tal MyPass­port. Easy. Tiny. USB-powered.²

So I finally made it to the counter to pay for the thing. No, I hadn’t shopped there before. Would I like to sign up for the Best Buy blah blah card thing? I sure would! And I pro­ceeded to do so. Take that, peo­ple behind me in line.

“Oh, my email address? Cer­tainly. It’s ‘catherine’…”

*tap tap tap*

“at”

*tap tap tap*

“cather­ine–”

*DELETE DELETE DELETE*

“Uh…no. I mean, yes, my name is Cather­ine. You spelled that cor­rectly. My email address is Cather­ine at CatherineWinters.com.”

*tap tap tap*

“Cather­ine with a ‘C’.”

And so on and so forth. So that was pretty fun.

Pro­tip: Once Best Buy secu­rity agrees not to call the police if you promise never to set foot in the store again, you can par­ti­tion your exter­nal drive as half Time Machine and half stor­age, for­mat­ting it for convenience’s sake as NTFS, not MacOSX-native HFS+. The NTFS 3G dri­ver for OSX allows you to both read and write NTFS-formatted dri­ves, and you’ll still be able to con­nect to Win­dows PCs should need arise.

If you do this, how­ever, you have to be really care­ful about eject­ing the stu­pid thing prop­erly. If any files get dam­aged, you’ll lose write access to the NTFS par­ti­tion and the result­ing error mes­sage will in no way be help­ful. If you sud­denly find that you can’t write to an NTFS-formatted disk, plug the thing into a Win­dows PC and run chkdsk on it to fix the errors.

Con­grat­u­la­tions, I just saved you three hours of Googling.

Next Time: In Case of Fire.

1. Yeah, you know that time that your com­puter died and you lost every­thing and you said, “next time, I’m going to do reg­u­lar back­ups” and then you didn’t? I’m mar­gin­ally smarter than you. [↩]
2. Unfor­tu­nately, my 5-year-old Dell 24″ mon­i­tor has a crappy, crappy USB hub that causes my Mac­Book Pro to ker­nel panic when­ever Time Machine starts–Windows users: that’s the OSX ver­sion of a blue­screen. There’s an app for that. So I lose a USB port; no hub for you, WD My Pass­port! This is actu­ally a good rea­son to use Firewire, come to think of it. [↩]

A decade in the life of…

Jan­u­ary 1, 2000
The Y2K bug does not result in air­planes falling from the sky, stock mar­kets crash­ing, or nuclear mis­siles launch­ing on their own. Pun­dits decry the waste­ful spend­ing of bil­lions to ensure noth­ing sig­nif­i­cant hap­pened. IT depart­ments world­wide sput­ter in bewil­der­ment. “But! But!”

Octo­ber, 2000
I come out to a few select friends and fam­ily. My par­ents imme­di­ately fight over which one of them is most accept­ing of it. It later turns out the answer is “neither”.

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001
The Amer­i­can Cen­tury comes to a close. The sub­se­quent decade sees West­ern civ­i­liza­tion dig its heels in, ineptly seek­ing secu­rity and short-term gains at all costs. I watch CNN for 6 months straight.

Octo­ber 23, 2001
Apple releases the iPod. I fail to see what the big deal is. Investors dis­agree sig­nif­i­cantly on this point.

Decem­ber 20, 2002
“Sec­ond Life? What’s that?” I ask as I click the link. “What a stu­pid name!”

Feb­ru­ary 1, 2003
I move to Van­cou­ver on an ill-advised whim. The next three years are…interesting. To this day, I still wake up think­ing cock­roaches are eat­ing dead skin off my face.

Jan­u­ary 14, 2006
Some dude cuts most of my face off and totally goes to town on my skull with power tools. For­tu­nately, he was a doc­tor. I can breathe through my nose now.

August, 2006
As a part-time con­tract LSL devel­oper, I am paid in US dol­lars. Cur­rency fluc­tu­a­tions force me to give up LSL devel­op­ment in favour of work­ing a min­i­mum wage retail job. I like it a lot better.

Novem­ber 18, 2006
I man­age to get pub­lished for the first time. It is not exactly my finest work.

Decem­ber 20, 2006
I’ve just been told about this new CMS that’s sup­posed to be pretty good. “Dru­pal? More like Poo–pal!” I exclaim to a cir­cle of blank, embar­rassed faces. Nice.

April 21, 2007
A lab test indi­cates I may have can­cer. Sub­se­quent tests indi­cate I have stress. I con­sider rem­e­dy­ing both by hav­ing alcoholism.

July 22, 2008
My Palm Treo dies. I buy an iPhone. Unfor­tu­nately, every­one I know can be divided into two camps: Peo­ple who already have iPhones and peo­ple who don’t care that I am now the coolest per­son ever.

August 15, 2008
I learn my knee pain is likely to be the result of osteoarthri­tis. At such an early age, the impli­ca­tion is that I will not be able to walk in 10 years.

Sep­tem­ber 1, 2008
I am told I do not have osteoarthri­tis after all. As such, I am likely to con­tinue walk­ing for some time. “Your knees look great,” the doc­tor says, peer­ing at the x-ray. “Say, how much exer­cise do you get?”

Jan­u­ary 1-Dec 31, 2009
I endure a great deal of bull­shit. My friends are kept appraised of the situation–to their dismay.

And that’s what I did dur­ing the aughts. How about you?

Blogathon 2009: Catherine’s Safari 4 Review

So I switched to Safari 4 from Fire­fox recently. The end.

Yeah, there’s more, actually.

First, the good parts, the ones that were enough to make me give up Fire­fox:

• It’s fast. Really, really fast.
• Pages you visit get indexed in OSX’s Spot­light. It’s like Google Desk­top for Fire­fox, only not totally ridiculous.
• While Safari doesn’t include sup­port for Firefox-style exten­sions, there are a bunch of cheesy hacks billed as plu­g­ins that look very sim­i­lar to the end-user. Apple has indi­cated they’re going to stop sup­port for these though. Hope­fully, by the time they do, Safari 5 will have incor­po­rated some of the func­tion­al­ity of the ones I like.

  I’m using Glims, Safari AdBlock and Inquisi­tor. Inquisi­tor is fairly rad, actu­ally. It changes how your search results work and adds sup­port for all your favourite search engines, search­ing them all in par­al­lel if that’s your thing. (It’s not mine.)

Now, the parts I hate:

• Select­ing text and right-clicking gives you the usual “Search in Google” option. It appar­ently can’t be changed to open in a new tab by default. So for me, a user who searches lots of strings and opens them in new tabs, I’m forced to Cmd-T new tabs open, copying-and-pasting the text into the search box.
• I’m not used to hav­ing to type a search before I tell Inquisi­tor where to search. In Fire­fox, it’s the other way around: you click the drop­down, select “Wikipedia” and then type what you want to find.

Still, these were not huge com­plaints. If you’re on Fire­fox on OSX, I’d give Safari 4 a try. Want to sync book­marks between the two? (And office com­put­ers, your iPhone, blogroll, etc?) Get Xmarks.

Mind you, I still have no plans to use any­thing but Fire­fox for devel­op­ment pur­poses. For mak­ing sites, Fire­bug is where it’s at. When casu­ally brows­ing, how­ever, I just don’t need to be using half my CPU and RAM to dis­play websites.

Dru­pal
Extension

Fire­bug

I def­i­nitely agree with MacBlogz’ assess­ment: “Safari 4: Three Steps For­ward, One Step Back

http://www.macblogz.com/2009/02/24/safari-4-three-steps-forward-one-step-back/

Blogathon 2009: Refueling

Ahh, deli­cious, deli­cious food. Cour­te­ously donated by Dairy Queen, as it hap­pens. They just deliv­ered it so we’re cur­rently all chow­ing down. A few peo­ple here raised the point ear­lier that 6am-6am is a pretty dif­fi­cult sched­ule to keep, and I def­i­nitely agree with that. I usu­ally like to eat lunch 3–4 hours after wak­ing up; Today? About seven hours.

For­tu­nately, I’m feel­ing my blog­ging pow­ers com­ing back and I recon­fig­ured my desk here at Workspace.

I brought along my track­ball and clicky Apple key­board^[1] for use when my fin­gers became just too sleepy, so I’m good to go there. I’ve boosted my lap­top up on some ASP pro­gram­ming books, because, well… insert elit­ist state­ment here, baby.

Dairy Queen wasn’t the only orga­ni­za­tion to have brought us good­ies, either. The BC SPCA dropped off a bunch of water bot­tles and a bor­der col­lie to enter­tain us, and the BC Can­cer Foun­da­tion has a bunch of chips wait­ing for us on the table. Cool!

[1] In my gym bag, hang­ing off the hous­ing for my rear brake han­dle on my drop bars. Nah, I don’t need pan­niers here.

Trackballs: A part of our heritage

In the sum­mer of 2007, I learned I had a bit of an RSI prob­lem when a can of Coke I was hold­ing sud­denly slipped from my grasp and plum­meted to the ground. I couldn’t apply enough pres­sure with my thumb and fin­gers to hold it in my hand.

One short diag­no­sis of ten­nis and golfer’s elbow later, (“Cather­ine, you use the mouse a lot, don’t you?”) my doc­tor ordered me to find a less dam­ag­ing point­ing device. Since then, I’ve mostly relied on my laptop’s trackpad.

That’s all well and good while using my lap­top, but for desk­tops, I needed a bet­ter solu­tion. It’s really just Cirque that still makes USB track­pads, and those aren’t super either.

The Apple iTunes store pro­vides a dozen or so “track­pad” apps, most of which use VNC to func­tion as an input device alone. These let you use your wifi net­work to get your iPhone going as a track­pad. Sur­pris­ingly, this works fairly well, but it really does take gad­get overkill to a whole new level.

So that leaves track­balls. Which is good, because I like them! ^[1]

So beau­ti­ful. So majestic.

Con­se­quently, for the past 18 months, I’ve been using a Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse 7.0, the lat­est ver­sion of the clas­sic ADB track­ball. Kens­ing­ton track­balls are so good, in fact, that some­times I print out trackball-advocacy lit­er­a­ture and go door-to-door, invit­ing peo­ple to hear the good news.

The lat­est ver­sion of the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse boasts the same four but­tons in a but­ter­fly lay­out, as well as a one-dimensional “scroll ring” around the ball. The ring’s move­ment could be a lit­tle smoother, but it moves eas­ily and is dif­fi­cult to nudge by mistake.

So yes, I strongly rec­om­mend the Kens­ing­ton Expert Mouse to any­one, if only because I rely on other people’s con­tin­ued inter­est in track­balls to ensure com­pa­nies keep pro­duc­ing them. Aside from that, track­balls are gen­er­ally fairly good, ego­nom­i­cally speak­ing, and also make it more dif­fi­cult for mouse-only friends to use your com­puter, pro­vid­ing you with ample oppor­tu­nity to look smug. If you’re into that sort of thing, I mean.

For my key­board, I’ve been alter­nat­ing between my Mac­Book Pro and a 2005-series white/clear Apple key­board. I own a Microsoft Nat­ural Pro ergonomic key­board, but I never liked the “mushy” feel­ing of the keys. The last-generation Apple keyboard’s keys aren’t buckling-spring. so it’s no Model M, but they def­i­nitely have suf­fi­cient give and are nicely clicky — within the lim­its of dome-switch keyboards.

Aside from feel, many Microsoft key­boards have a bit of an issue that’s always bugged me: they tend not to detect the left shift key being depressed when char­ac­ter entry keys have already been hit. This makes my hastily-typed smi­ley emoti­cons look ter­ri­ble: ;0

I am pleased to say that Apple’s key­boards have never exhib­ited this problem.

Track­balls: A part of our heritage.

[1] Little-known Cana­dian trivia: the Royal Cana­dian Navy devel­oped the first track­ball back in the 1950s.

How­ever, astute Cana­di­ans will note that this photo from Wikipedia shows the DATAR track­ball assem­bly using flat-head screws, rather than supe­rior, patri­otic Robert­son screws. For shame!

Sickgue: backups are spiffy!

I’m sick. Sure, I’m get­ting over it now, but it’s been a cou­ple of days. I’m not actu­ally sure what I have, only that it sucks. So far, I’m pre­tend­ing it wasn’t due to my walk­ing to the phar­macy in the rain the day before I started see­ing symp­toms. No, that’s crazy talk.

Recently, it seems like every­one I know is either sick, or involved in some mas­sive family/social life drama, or hav­ing stuff stolen. I lost one half of a pair of ear­rings, Eric lost his cam­era equip­ment and Rob from Social Sig­nal had his Mac­Book stolen.

Rob, of course, had the courage to at least put on a brave enter­tain­ing face for the rest of us, but man… that had to hurt. After a quick “back up your data, seri­ously” con­ver­sa­tion, I did just that. Badly. But I’m going to grab another drive this week, so… you know, please don’t steal it before then, guys.

In the mean­time, I’ve been think­ing about ways of LoJack­ing my Mac­Book Pro to pro­duce some kind of enter­tain­ing pho­to­blog of snap­shots of who­ever stole it, com­plete with a record of access points detected, cross-referenced to WiFiMug. (or bet­ter yet, some obses­sive wardriver’s map!)

Expe­ri­ence tells me that stolen lap­tops are rarely recov­ered, and that pho­tos of com­puter thieves are fre­quently faked. Still, it’s some­thing I’m set­ting up just in case.

Maki Mac Mitt!

Fear not, cit­i­zens! To bet­ter help me fight crime do my new job, I got a new Mac­Book Pro for work. It’s pretty shiny. And scratch­able, by the looks of things. To pro­tect its fin­ish and main­tain a sharp, pro­fes­sional image for meet­ings, it’s impor­tant to always travel with the Mac­Book secured inside a durable, padded sleeve. Also, the sleeve should have pic­tures of sushi on it.

Say it with me: “awwwww!”

Want your own? I ordered this spiffy, custom-made sleeve from Salty­gal on Etsy.com. She makes super-cool stuff, and for very afford­able prices. I’m going to order more. At ran­dom. It’ll be good.

(I’d also like to note that while the above photo was posed, it was not actu­ally staged. I really was –and con­tinue to be– that excited.)

Correct Home/End functionality in Firefox on Mac OSX

How cool is this? Jim Menden­hall at Starry Hope offers some help to us Mac Switch­ers. Long one of the top Google results for “osx home end”, Jim devel­oped a small app to replace the Mac’s default key behav­ior with that of every other win­dow­ing sys­tem ever. (That’s right, nit­pick­ers. Ever.) Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t work in Fire­fox… until now!

It’s still in beta, and the only way to grab a copy is to bug Jim, but I’m using it and it works great. He’s still work­ing on adding sup­port for Shift-Home/Shift-End text selec­tion, but it’s already made edit­ing text fields in web pages so much eas­ier. Thanks, Jim!