Hi,

Just to let everyone know that I'm doing another Cocoa Programming Workshop in Austin, Texas on the first week-end of december.

So if you want to learn to program the Mac, then come see us! No, prior programming experience needed.

Visit http://www.macdev.ca for more information.

Eric

Another (possible) reason you should backup your HD every month.

I recently purchased a PowerBook Duo 280c on LowEndMac's swap list. I was so excited to finally get it home! I played with it for a while and then went to bed.

The next morning, I woke up and used it more. It was fun, even though I've used OS 7.6 many times before. Later that day, I wanted to see if the battery worked at all, just in case I was desperate to receive a fax stuck on the road without my power adapter. I put the battery in and it registered in the menu bar. Then, the PowerBook shut down. cold. I then removed the battery to attempt to start up again.

For those of you that remember, the boot sequence consisted of a chime, gray screen, then a smiling Mac icon, Welcome to Macintosh, then the startup. And when something minor goes wrong, you'd see a floppy disk with a flashing question mark. (Nowadays it's a folder and question mark) When something major goes wrong, you see a frowning Mac and an error code (to make it easy for techies to diagnose the problem). Well it turns out, that when I started mine up, the happy Mac would come on for a split second, then the floppy disk / flashing ?. and then the Sad Mac.

Anyone who's used a Duo before knows that there are virtually no ports on it. There's a docking port, a serial port, and a fax modem if you're lucky. I don't have any docking stations or floppy drives, so there is currently *no* way for me to install any data. And a friend suggested that I re-write the Mac OS onto the HD. Sounds good...

I didn't have anything important on there (How could I get data on it?) , but still - just goes to show you that you should listen to J when he says to back up your hard drive!

Oh, and later that day, the screen shattered from a heavy object falling on it. So for now it's completely useless.

For now, I've been Ian/macgeek0391/the OS X nerd , whatever you want to call me. O:-)

Happy new year's!

I just released Cross-platform Portable Firefox 1.5! Cross-platform Portable Firefox is the Mozilla Firefox web browser packaged as a cross-platform portable app, so you can take your bookmarks, extensions, history, cookies, and saved passwords with you. It works on both Macs and PCs. New in this version: greatly enhanced speed and Firefox 1.5 included.

I have just posted my how-to for getting iPod Linux up-and-running on iPod nanos. After the Linux installation you can play Doom (iDoom), and watch full-color movies!

O'Reilly's Virtual Private Networks by Charlie Scott, Paul Wolfe, and Mike Erwin.

My review of this book can best be summed up in two words: Don't bother. The printing date on this book is January 1999 and I don't know that any further updates have been done. Generally speaking, the information in this book is outdated and probably no longer relevant to most people interested in VPNs in 2005.

I have just finished putting together my cross-platform (Mac and PC) version of John Haller's Portable Firefox. With this you can store all of your bookmarks, cookies, extensions, plugins, and just about all your other browser-related files on a USB drive, and access your files and settings easily on every computer you have to use.

Mabye Apple's transition to Intel CPUs won't be so bad after all! I have just finished putting to together a list of programs that are compiled to run o future Intel Macs! Looks like Apple is making it easy to port applications! BBEdit and iTattle are on the list.

One of the great things about Google maps is it has its roots in XML. To translate for the non-web developers out there, it basically means Google maps are user hackable. This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and video to create an interactive multimedia map.

Roll your own Google maps

I wanted to follow a wise man's advice and backup my system before upgrading to Tiger.

Since it was my main working system I decided to go back to Panther for now. No problem, I thought as I had a complete working, and bootable backup. So I fired up SuperDuper and procedded to restore my original system back to the internal drive.

The process kept halting with a crash and an error message. Tech support for SuperDuper was fantastic and after looking through the system log files we determined that the problem lay with some bad Soundtrack files. Deleted them en mass and the backup went smoothly and fast.

At that point I used the incremental feature as I already had half the drive backed up and only need to get the files that were not already copied. I have tried CCC before and was frustrated with it's slow speed and poor performance. And it never actualy worked for me either.

So for a great and fast way to back up your stuff, I highly recommend SuperDuper. I am a registerd user and the $19.95 they charge for full access to the product is well worth it, considering the time and frustration it will save you.

For those who missed this in Macworld.

Teleport is a simple utility to let you use one single mouse and keyboard to control several of your Macs.
Simply reach the edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your other Mac! The pasteboard can even be synchronized between the computers.

http://abyssoft.com/software/

This thing rocks, I use it at work and it still fascinates me everytime.
scottie