Marianne Schultz

the musings of a geeky girl

Musings of a geeky girl. About | Contact

Social

iTunes, App Store, iBookstore, and Mac App Store

Categories

Backing up is (not) a bitch

by Leave a Comment

I complained most vociferously about Time Machine recently when it up and quit on me without any real warning, as well as Tweeted about my husband’s own failure-to-back-up issues when his MacBook’s hard drive went boobies up in the water a little while ago. Since my MacBook Air is now the center of my work and personal life, backing up religiously is now top of mind for me and I’m considering adding one more back-up option in case Something Really Bad happens.

I’ve been researching some on-line options – the kind that offer unlimited storage and automated back-ups for about $5 per month – like BackBlaze and Carbonite. I think I will be trying Carbonite first, since they currently have a promo going as a sponsor of TWIT’s MacBreak Weekly podcast (which is my favorite Mac podcast) that gives you a couple of months for free with the “twit” promo code, though I just noticed on their site that compatibility with Snow Leopard isn’t coming until November. Hmmm. I am now hoping Something Really Bad does not happen between now and then.
Regarding my husband, the one good thing about the hard drive disaster that he suffered through is that he is now a fan of backing up. I took care of finding him a new hard drive (a Western Digital Scorpio 320GB 7200 RPM drive, bitches!) which has more space than he will ever need since he uses my iTunes library on my Mac and only uses his Mac for internet surfing, emailing, and storing a few documents here and there. We installed Snow Leopard on his Mac and I set up him to connect to the external hard drive connected to my Airport Extreme Base Station, making a partition I’d previously set up for him there is Time Machine drive. He was a little miffed at me since I’d recently re-partitioned that drive and made his part smaller, but he hadn’t been using it at all before the infamous drive failure and I thought the space would go to better use for my Time Machine back-up. You snooze, you lose, little buddy! Now that his Mac is back up and running, he wanted to get a larger drive for us to share and we are going to split a 2 TB (TB!) Western Digital My Book Studio Edition drive between us for our Time Machine back-ups. It arrived last week, so I’ll be setting that up shortly and will retire the other drive for desktop use – I’ll probably turn that one into my weekly cloning drive and free up the portable drive I’d been using for clones for other stuff.

I hereby dub thee “The Knight of Schultz Back-ups”!
Forgive me for the unkind and mildly-evil thoughts I’m about to write down. When the hard drive in my husband’s MacBook crashed, he vilified Macs, saying that I always told him that they were supposed to be more reliable and easy to use and just look at what happened, dammit! Of course, it somehow became my fault (my husband excels at boogerheadedness from time to time) and he ignored my claims that hard drive failures are independent of the operating system and can happen to any machine. Anyway, in near-karmic retribution, the hard drive on his trusty Dell laptop that he uses for work – a computer which is incidentally newer than his MacBook – failed about 2 weeks after his MacBook’s. I would not have wanted to be the IT guy who helped him with it at work – he spent countless hours trying to retrieve his files (yeah, no back-ups at his company either – bad IT!) and was only able to salvage some of them in the end and move them to a new hard drive. While I don’t wish hard drive failure on anyone (well, maybe one or two people), my husband has now learned that hard drive failures can happen in any machine. And he hasn’t said one bad word about Macs since. 😉

My new pet: Snow Leopard

by Leave a Comment

Fortunately, it’s not a real Snow Leopard or my Great Dane would have some serious issues with it – as would we, since I’m quite sure humans can be considered exceptionally convenient fast food snacks for Snow Leopards, always ready to give a good chase to kick in that predator instinct before being gulped down at a piping hot 98.7º.

Silliness aside, I finally installed Snow Leopard two weekends ago, backing up my hard drive twice (via Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner) before erasing my hard drive with Disk Utility and doing a clean install. I didn’t transfer any settings from the clone of my Leopard installation, only copying my music, photos, and emails directly. I did let MobileMe take care of mail settings and rules, my Safari bookmarks, and my contacts and calendars, which it handled without any problems. I’ve been slowly re-insalling apps from scratch and have been trying to pare down what I use. I was particularly frustrated with Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6, which installs a bunch of other useless crap that I’d rather forego, but the installer doesn’t offer the ability to customize the installation to do this. Why does Adobe think I want an extra 345MB of my hard drive space for this Adobe Bridge CS3 crap? Hint to Adobe: I don’t want it. Space is at a premium on my 128GB SSD, thank you very much.

64-bit, baby!
My MacBook Air’s processor is 64-bit capable so I did a minor bit of system file modification to enable 64-bit by default. I didn’t do any scientific testing to time how long it took to do common tasks before enabling this, but my inner clock informally tells me that there really hasn’t been much of a difference in speed. I use Safari as my primary browser and I’m sad to say that it still gets bogged down and is not as responsive as I’d like it to be even when running in 64-bit mode. The new access features in the Finder (new Expose and Stacks capabilities) are nice, but not earth-shattering. I no longer have problems with Bluetooth acting up, which is great since that usually got me mad enough to pound on my poor Bluetooth keyboard in frustration. Time Machine operates less obtrusively before – I rarely even notice when it’s running anymore. And, I’d say that my MacBook Air is running a bit cooler – the fans don’t seem to run as much as they did on Leopard.
All in all, I see very subtle changes but nothing spectacular. So far, it still seems worth the $25 (thanks to Amazon and their slightly lower price for it) I paid for Snow Leopard and I have no complaints about it at all. Plus, the clean install I did really made me feel better about my Mac though I still have some cleaning up to do to get back some more hard drive space. My next major move is to install Parallels to run one measly application that won’t work with CrossOver, though I may see if I can get my husband to do it on his Mac (he has a shiny new 320GB hard drive in his MacBook now and has the room to spare) so I won’t have to. Muahahahahaha…

Interlude: A Porsche nearly killed me. And I loved it.

by Leave a Comment

In addition to being a Mac geek, I love speed. I used to ride motorcycles, and even raced very briefly, but a bad accident several years ago (and my inability to get back on that horse well enough afterward) slowly made it less fun over time and I’ve since turned to track driving in my car as a replacement. My car isn’t the sportiest or fastest and frankly earns me a few funny looks at the track driving and club autocross events I go to, but it does me just fine to drive as fast as I can, leaving hot little bits of my tires on the track as vicious mementos of my passage.
 
At today’s club autocross event, I took a ride with a fellow club member who owns a Porsche 996 GT3. I wasn’t enamored of its color (lime green) but it’s a Porsche, so I let that slide. The driver was an older gentleman and I fully expected that he would be fast but not horribly aggressive in flinging it around the track. I mean, who wouldn’t be a little careful with a sports car that costs over $100,000? I was wrong. HOLY JESUS MOTHER OF GOD WAS I WRONG.

The fastest I’d ever gone on a motorcycle (if there are any Maryland state troopers reading this, please avert your eyes now) was 155 mph on my old Honda F4 on a deserted stretch of highway. I was trying to keep up with some riding buddies. I was the only girl. And I couldn’t keep up with them even at 155 mph (they were on liter bikes while my sweet little red and black Honda was only a “mere” 600). I survived that (mind-numbingly stupid) escapade and shortly stopped riding on the street and restricted myself to riding on racetracks only. Regardless, speed in a car doesn’t bother me. I’ve had past boyfriends try to impress me with their fast cars, but I never squealed and pleaded with them to slow down in the way they expected. Why would I have? They were going slowly compared to what I was used to.

So, color me surprised when I got in that Porsche today because that grandfatherly-like-yet-wickedly-fast man scared the ever-loving crap out of me. I was clinging to the door handle and the seat, eyes and mouth wide open inside my helmet, and I’m pretty sure the high-pitched screeching sound that I heard throughout the ride came from me and not his brakes. It was highly undignified but I could do nothing to stop myself. Fortunately, I don’t think he even noticed as he worked to keep that beast of a machine shiny side up and heading in the right direction. He didn’t have an in-cabin video camera as some drivers do. There will be no videos of me drooling and screaming in a Porsche on YouTube. Yay for me.

01This is what I need. Yes. Yes, it is.

I’m proud to say that the Porsche gentleman made his fastest run of the day with me in the car – he said I was a good luck charm. My knees nearly buckled when I stepped out of that lime green monster. I’ve never met a car that made me feel like that – not even the Maserati Quattroporte I had the good luck to flog a little under the most unlikely circumstances (on a job interview a few months ago – that was the best hiring manager EVER) or my cousin’s BMW M3. I really need to get me a Porsche.

Review of Navigon’s MobileNavigator turn-by-turn navigation app for the iPhone

by Leave a Comment

I’ve finished my latest iPhone GPS app review – this time of Navigon’s MobileNavigator app. I rarely gush positively about anything I review, but I have to say Navigon has done a fantastic job with this app. With that said, I must note that it still has a few issues that really bother me. You can get the details in my review here.

I also recently reviewed the TomTom app for work – you can read that review here. To give you a very high-level summary of the TomTom app: don’t waste $99 on it – TomTom is well behind Navigon and Sygic in terms of features at this point.

Someone may need to stop me

by Leave a Comment

My first Mac laptop was a 12″ PowerBook G4 that I bought in 2003. Prior to that, I’d been on the Dark Side for a while, owning PCs for a few years after having my very first Mac, an LC40, at university. My 12″ PowerBook was absolutely perfect, if a little hot on the lap, at just the right size to make it very portable yet with specs that made it powerful enough to do everything I needed. I sold that lovely little beast when I bought a black MacBook and regretted it despite the upgrade in processing power. I’ve come across a mint last-generation 12″ PowerBook for sale in a forum I frequent and I’m .35 millimeters away from making an offer on it.

Why? I have no idea. I have a MacBook Air which does quite fine as my main computer. I don’t need another Mac. If anything, I should be saving up for the rumored tablet that may or may not make an appearance early next year. I have such fond memories of that 12″ PowerBook, though. Maybe it was more Tiger than anything, but I don’t seem to remember as many glitches with it – it went to sleep on its own reliably, didn’t get bogged down by invisible processes, and was small enough to carry around in a bag that looked like a purse. I still miss the damn thing and it makes no sense.
Gah! What is wrong with me? Am I moving into the Collector stage in my Mac obsession? If I started at the Mac N00b stage and moved through the Mac Snob stage (the Fangirl/Fanboy status is not a stage – it is a permanent state of mind once one enters the Mac Snob stage, by the way), I must indeed be into the Collector stage where I will begin to obtain older Macs and reminisce about them fondly. I still have the urge to buy new Macs, so I must not have lost my Excited Mac Nut status (combined with the standard card-holding Geek rank I have held for many years now) yet either. Well, let’s just hope that I don’t go overboard in this stage. If I start talking about getting a Mac Mini and changing it into a Cube, someone plan an intervention, please.
Verified by MonsterInsights