Shawn Blanc » MarsEdit: Helping the Personal Publishing Revolution: “MarsEdit has a built in bookmarklet which can be used to generate a brand new post from any webpage. To set it up choose Install Bookmarklet from the MarsEdit menu.”
I’ve been using MarsEdit for months and somehow I missed this feature. Very handy.
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I found myself in the mouse system preference pane tonight and noticed a little checkbox …
“For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button”
Hmmm.
I checked it and then put two fingers on the trackpad while clicking a desktop icon. It gave me the drop down menu consistent with a right click!
How come I never noticed this before. Now I can right click with one hand. Am I the only one that didn’t know about this?
I’ve had several people ask me about backup strategies lately so I thought I’d share a post about my ideas on the subject. A backup plan doesn’t need to be complicated. With some of the new tools available it doesn’t even have to be expensive. It just needs to follow a few simple rules.
The more complex you make your backup plan, the less likely you are to follow it. Complexity used to be a requisite of a backup strategy. Thankfully that is not true any more.
If you have your data backed up in one place you are “probably” okay. However there are a variety of circumstances that may cause one backup to be one too few. For instance, what if:
* You have a power surge that blows out your computer and your backup drive;
* A thief steals your computer and the shiny Western Digital box sitting next to it;
* Your computer fails and unbeknownst to you, your backup drive has been broken for several months?
That last one happened to a friend of mine. He lost five years worth of family photos. So having two backups in two different places is probably a good idea. If you don’t have a choice and only have one backup drive, I recommend you don’t keep it plugged in and store it somewhere else in your home.
My backup plan uses three external hard drives. I could pull it off with two but I happen to have an extra drive and I am a bit irrational when it comes to backups. So, anyway, my backup gear is …
1. a 1TB Western Digital MyBook with Firewire 800;
2. a 500GB Western Digital USB 2.0 Drive;
3. a 320GB Lacie USB 2.0 Drive.
My plan involves a combination of Carbon Copy Cloner and Time Machine. I was a happy user of SuperDuper but I’m still waiting for them to release a Leopard version. So my strategy is to keep it simple and keep in two places so what I do is this:
I keep the 1TB and 320GB home on my desk. The 1TB drive holds my Time Machine drive and other miscellaneous stuff that doesn’t get copied in Time Machine like my Parallels folder, Aperture library, and a few other oversized files. The 320GB is used for my clone image whether it be Carbon Copy Cloner or (hopefully soon) SuperDuper. I do the clone a few times a week. Now I know 320GB is a lot for a clone drive. But if everything goes according to plan … I just may need that space soon. More to come on that later.
The 500GB drive stays at my office and also holds a clone of my drive plus other miscellaneous media. The clone gets run a few times a week. Often I’ll set it to copy before heading off to lunch or a long meeting.
That is it. Simple system + multiple locations = Backup mojo.
So that is the heavy lifting of my backup plan. There are a few extra wrinkles however. For instance, I use my iDisk to keep copies of my essential documents. I know keeping it synced requires a nice chunk of hard drive space but I’m okay with that. I also store some files in the cloud in other places (Mozy is a good solution), and often carry copies of my most recent stuff on a 2GB thumb stick. I don’t do any backups to CD or DVD. It reminds me too much of the bad old days and boxes of floppies.
Let me know your plan or share it in the comments.
Apple has this funny habit of adding useful features and not publishing it or telling anyone about it. Here is one that may not be all that useful but definitely fun.
option + shift + k
Go ahead. Try it. Did it make you smile?
Mac OSXHints posted its results on its top 10 hints contest. Number one was the hack that allows you to put a “recent documents” icon in the Leopard Dock. I’ve been using this hack since they first discovered it and it is quite handy.
You can read the entire list right here.
Here is one I discovered by accident. If you right click in the lower pane of OS X’s ubiquitous Media Browser you get a contextual menu that allows you to change view preference (allowing sorting!) and a few other bells and whistles for audio.
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MacSparky, os x, tips
I’ve excepted my Aperture library from TimeMachine and over the weekend I was making sure to back up my Aperture library to a few places. In the process I managed to duplicate my image folder by a factor of four. Yep. It went from 8,000 images to 32,000 images. When I looked in the folder I saw things like this.
Dave running with scissors
Dave running with scissors (1)
Dave running with scissors (2)
Dave running with scissors (3)
I’m pretty certain this was my own doing and not Apertures but it left me with a trick problem of how to get rid of all those extra copies. I certainly wasn’t going to do it by hand for 8,000 photos. I started thinking about some fancy Automator or Applescript action but then I remembered that Aperture has an “Move Master” command. I ran it putting the masters in a new location. That essentially rebuilt the 8,000 photo folder making it possible for me to simply delete the bloated folder.
MacOSXHints recently figured out that Leopard Mail has some helpful searching tools. Put simply, some of the improved spotlight functionality has found its way into the mail search code.
The three tags that are known at this time are from, subject, and email.
This command would get you copies of all emails from me.
This would return all the emails with MacSparky in the subject line.
This returns all the email from a specific email address (as opposed to the identifying name tag).
The full article is at OSX hints right here. It is strange they don’t include the boolean operators (which you can use to search email through Spotlight). It is also strange, but not unusual, for Apple to include this kind of code and tell nobody about it. Doesn’t it make you wonder that some software engineer might have just put it in for his/her own interest and not bothered to tell anyone about it?
I had one of those little “Aha!” moments today. I was putting together an outline for a work project and next to it I had a Preview window with a long PDF document in it. I kept moving back and forth between the windows and activating the Preview window to scroll down the document then clicking back in OmniOutliner to resume work there. Well wouldn’t you know one time I forgot to click first in Preview AND IT DIDN’T MATTER. Yup. In Leopard you can mouse scroll (or two finger scroll on your laptop) and move through an inactive window. Try it yourself.
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I’ve been helping a switcher friend get up to speed on the Mac. One resource I gave him was TUAW’s Mac 101 series. He reports these entries have been really helpful to him so I thought I’d share it here. Head on over to Mac 101 and I guarantee you’ll learn a thing or two.
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