Entries Tagged 'Apple' ↓

If you are on Mac, you must get SuperDuper! and an External Harddisk for yourself. What is SuperDuper?

SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable and easy to use.

I discovered SuperDuper about two months ago while trying to install Leopard on my MacBook. I installed it through Vishal’s MacBook (my DVD drive has stopped working). Later I discovered that I screwed up Vishal’s machine, and it wouldn’t boot at all. I had to finally reinstall the OS on Vishal’s machine. Those were horrible 3 days, trying out everything I could to get the two systems to work correctly. But that story some other time.

But I learned my lesson (again!). I should regularly backup. There was too much trust on the machine and a high ego that was coming in the way so far. But I dropped all that.

After much thinking, I got myself a Western Digital My Book 500GB external harddisk. (for INR 6000, that was a good deal too). It supports FireWire (so I can easily boot the Mac off it) and has plenty of space. I was thinking about a 200 or 300GB drive earlier, but went with 500GB because of the price.

And I feel safe about my data now. Everyweek, I connect the disk to my MacBook, run a full backup with SuperDuper! and I am done. It takes only a few minutes to backup the files that have changed from last week and I am certain I can easily access them now.

I don’t use TimeMachine. I think it’s waste of resources, and I don’t need versions of my file. If I delete a file, I delete it for good. I also think SuperDuper! is one of the easiest software for backup. The most important feature is that it leaves the backup drive bootable. So you can simply plug it in and get started - even if your whole disk crashed.

From a careless geek to a peaceful geek - the journey was remarkable!

I haven’t figured out a solution to this yet.. I sync my iCal calendar events with iPod Nano 3rd Generation via iTunes. I can see the .ics files when I go to the folder in Finder. But the events do not display on the iPod.

This is puzzling me.. Is it because of the @ character iGTD adds to the calendar name? What could it be?

Anyone had a similar problem?

I have done this so many times, still I find a new problem doing recursive search and replace each time! Here's one small shell script that puts the issues I had on the Mac doing search and replace on a directory recursively.

Save the file as rpl.sh, chmod it 755, and execute it like:

Does the job for me! This could be done in a single line, I got some ideas of using xargs etc, but all that did not work on my Mac (at least). So resorting to this.

And yes, if you are going to use this, take a little time and do some argument checking before passing them around! Unless you think only a God user like you is going to use it!

A poster Edwin Tofslie created, is making rounds on the web these days! I must admit, it's rather good!

This shows the evolution of Apple products over time. Looking at the poster, I started thinking about what computers I used in those years! I was still on PC AT and XT in 1990. Would get my hand on a BBC if I fought with batch mates in the school computer class. No mouse, very little color. "Floppy" disks to boot!

And in 1997 I got my Compaq Presario 1425. Then a few other ones in between. Then a Compaq laptop, a Powerbook and now a MacBook.

Do you feel like doing a poster like this of the gadgets you have owned?

I had multiple mp3 audio tracks of a lecture. They worked fine in iTunes since I could create a playlist and tracks would play one after another. I moved the tracks to my phone to listen to them on the move, but the phone has some weired sorting method that played the tracks in wrong order. So I needed to combine these tracks in one.

Tried with GarageBand first. Placing one track after another. This got a bit tricky, and somehow did not allow me to add tracks after a particular number of seconds of playback. I don't know why it happened like that, but importing and adjusting tracks in GarageBand was taking too much time, so I abandoned it.

Did a bit of Googling around to see what else is possible. Found that if I had QuickTime Pro, I could join the tracks into a single file by copy pasting them into a new audio track. I do not have QT Pro so this wouldn't work.

Found a $10 software called iTunesJoin that could do the trick. Obviously, the task wasn't worth that money!

And hey, on a forum posting that initially looked useless, I found the gem! You can simply cat mp3 files!

So the following command in Terminal:

cat *.mp3 > newfile.mp3

Will join all your mp3 files in the current directory. It's a simple file concatenation operation. Multiple mp3 files stringed together work like one big file! Even if they had multiple ID3 tags, it worked for me. I just added a new ID3 tag using iTunes once the file was created.

Later, I also got Join Together on Doug's Applescript for iTunes library. BTW, this library has tons of useful AppleScripts.

I can happily move the file to my phone now! I just wished Windows XP within Parallels detected my phone!