I haven’t posted on my tumblr for a long time. I guess I forgot about it and got distracted with twitter and Facebook. Using the iPhone app on my iPad. Hoping to see an official iPad app soon.
With Starbuck’s recent decision to move from T-Mobile to AT&T for wireless access, will they soon be providing free usage for iPhone users in their nifty little coffee shops? Let’s hope so.
I upgraded to Leopard this weekend on my work machine, a MacBook Pro. It was a seamless upgrade. I had already upgraded my home machine, a Mac Pro, several weeks ago and that went fine too. I have been enjoying some of the new features in Leopard, mostly spaces, quickview, and stacks. Time Machine is really slick too, but I am just figuring out how it works alongside SuperDuper, my backup program of choice. Over the course of this weekend, I found three things that helped me out.
Upgrade trick for 10.5.1 (if you hit the snag I did)
I installed the latest 10.5.1 upgrade on my Mac Pro and ran into a scary problem (I did not run into this on my MBP.) As it was rebooting after the install, it got into an endless cycle of asking me to register. I could not get out of that cycle even after repeated hard restarts. Thank goodness I could use my MBP to search the internet for an answer, which turned out to be:
1. Force reboot the machine by holding down the shift key during power up.
2. When you get to the “safe mode” screen, click the back button to cancel login.
3. Click the soft reboot option. When my machine rebooted, the updates finished installing and I was in business again.
Parallels and Leopard
After my Leopard upgrade, I fired up Parallels (I run XP Pro.) I immediately got an error message that said my OS was too old for the existing version of MacFUSE. Turns out, all you need to do is go here and grab the 10.5-1.3.1 version of MacFuse, install it, and you are good to go.
iStat menus
I got a tip from a colleage at work about a really nifty Mac system monitoring tool called “iStat pro.” It is a dashboard widget and while that is handy, I started using another tool from the same company called “iStat menus” and I am finding that even nicer. I am not a huge Dashboard widget user — to be honest, I often forget to use them. But, putting the monitoring info right in plain sight on my menu bar is really useful. Plus, if you show the date and time in the menu bar, you have a nice drop down of a calendar, something I know I will use a lot. Both products are from a company called iSlayer and are free (donations voluntary.)
…and if you watch closely, you will even see glimpses of Sprocket the dog! (One of the inspirations for the name I gave my dog…)
My team rocks! Check out this video they did at the Lotusphere conference that is happening this week. This is the first of many. Subscribe to our channel!
I am really happy about the recent announcement at Macworld that Garmin will provide better native support for the Mac. Being both a Garmin and Mac fan, I am looking forward to this.
IBM just released its prediction for the top 5 innovations that will change our lives over the next five years. I absolutely love the “know what you eat” one. I joined my first CSA this summer and am really getting into the idea of eating organic, locally grown food. So the idea of knowing about all the food I eat is fantastic. I also really like the one about using a star trek-like sensor to figure out what ails you. I’ve been waiting for that one for years!
It’s snowshoeing time again! Sprocket is very excited about this fact. Here’s the full set on flickr.
Cisco has created a contest to get ideas for their next business opportunity. Interesting “community source” idea. Nice payoff for the winner.
