Kappa and Mu

I just received my new toys today. Nothing too big, but i picked up a nice wireless Mac mouse and keyboard. I wasn't expecting them to arrive so quickly but I am glad they did. Means I get to start playing with them sooner. The mouse is nice and exactly what I expected as I use on just like it at work. The keyboard, on the other hand, is smaller than I expected. I expected a full sized keyboard with the number pad on the side, but alas it was not to be. The keyboard is about the same size as my MacBook keyboard with no number pad. Actually, it is the exact same size, I just checked. I miss the number pad for inputting numbers but I really don't input that many numbers at home so I can do without. I am hoping this will help with ergonomics a little. My table and desk are too high to type from and to low to set the laptop on for viewing. This way I can now place the keyboard on my lap and can put the laptop up on something to get the right height. Now I just need to work on my touch typing skills so I am not looking down at the keyboard all the time when I type. Following on my naming conventions, I have assigned the keyboard and mouse greek letters as subsets of the computers main name. I have been giving all my nameable electronic gadgets star names. The computer is Gamma Draconis. At least there is less chance of running out of stars than my buying too many gadgets. At least I can hope so.

On a good note, my computer is up and running again. There are a few minor things to finish tweaking and installing before I am completely satisfied. I am missing some documents and movies but I think I can find some of them on the internet so I am not too concerned. I fixed up the old G4 Mac living under my desk and will set up a backup system just in case. I have been writing most of my documents online for at least the last year and a half so I haven't lost any critical pieces of writings. I lost a few music files and movies that I got from my brother but I should be able to get them back. It is the stuff I can't remember that mildly bothers me. It mustn't have been important but what if it was. Oh well. I will be getting a proper backup drive in the future and I will be upgrading the G4 to a Mac mini someday soon. Visa paperwork and a new sofa are taking priority right now on the bank account.

Up and mostly running

My computer is up and running for the most part. I will be bringing it into work tomorrow and upgrading to Leopard and downloading much needed software. The fast internet connection will will be quite handy. I can also grab some much needed files and stuff from my server which is also at school. I will be missing many of my podcasts but I can get most of them online if I visit each podcasts homepage. A little tedious but in some cases worth the trouble.

While I was trying to get the computer up and running today, which I had forgotten my disks at home making it difficult, I picked up a few nice gadgets. I bought a wireless bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse. While I already have a bluetooth enabled wireless mouse, I don't like the scroll wheel, it clicks and doesn't scroll sideways. I tend to spend quite a bit of time on the computer at work filling out paperwork and stuff so I have really come to like the mighty mouse. The new mighty mouse also had a right and left click even though it looks like it had one button. I also picked up a mini-dvi to vga adapter so I can plug into a non-dvi monitor or hopefully one day a flat screen TV to watch downloaded shows or stream from the internet. There are many sites now that allow people to catch up with TV shows that they missed or for people like me who don't have TV to watch shows for the first time. I save a lot of money without cable and I can avoid commercials and other crap. aCtually, now-a-days, I find there is a lot of crap on TV.

While I was surfing around for gadgets and trying to keep from completely impulse buying, I was looking at the Mac mini. I have always liked it, but I dislike the fact that you can't really add more storage space to it internally. I think I am going to get one anyway to replace my G4 which I will sell to fund the Mac mini. I don't really use the G4 and the Mac mini supports wifi so I can put one wifi node in the apartment and everything can talk. I will also be getting an large external storage drive to hold TV shows, podcasts, and the all important backups.

A real duh moment

Everyone once in a while I have a real duh moment, this was one of them. I was working on fixing up some disk permissions and much needed disk defrags. I also had a small partition that used to have Windows on it but I wanted to get the partition back for the extra space. So the big duh moment was when I accidentally reformatted my hard drive. I lost everything. As disastrous as this sounds, when I really think back on what was on my drive, there is very little that wasn't already backup up somewhere else either on another computer or on the internet. Thank goodness I have been a die hard user of Google Docs otherwise I would have lost much more then I did. In the end, I think I lost a few recipes and maybe a few files tha tI can't remember. My logic is if I can't remember it, it wasn't important enough to be worth trying to recover. So after looking at various data recovery softwares and talking to a Mac store about my options (they tried to suggest a company that charges 1000$, yes that is one thousand), I decided to just reinstall over the wiped drive and go about my life as normal.

In the end, I now have more space on my drive where before it was at a premium and I will be looking at doing regular backups and likely also looking into putting even more of my stuff online in some fashion. But for now, other then the general feeling of being stupid, I don't feel that I have really lost anything. Now if my server where to ever go down, that would be a whole other story. I really need to bring it home from work since it is back up and running. I also don't need it there and I will be looking in to getting internet access at home shortly so it will be put to better use at home.

Wow, Hard drive woes

I recently tried to replace the hard drive on my laptop. I figured it would be easy. Back up the data, swap drives, replace data. Unfortunately swapping was the easy part. Once I got the correct tools, I had no problems swapping out the drives. I didn't have too much problems backing up the data, which ended up getting done in two different ways. It was the getting it back onto the new hard drive that was the problem. Once I formatted the disk and moved things over, the computer didn't want to start, then the permissions were horribly off and the disk utility had to be run several times. In the end it took about 2 days to finally get the hard drive backed up then another 2 days to get the data back on and all the permissions working correctly. The laptop is still at work but at least it is working. I will have to pick it up in the morning before I head out for a hike.

I decided last minute to maybe go hiking. I figure if I wake up in time then I will go, otherwise, I will catch up on sleep and cleaning. I haven't been home in a while. Mostly I end up back at the apartment to feed the cat then I am off and running. Since my boyfriend will be un in NYC this weekend, I will have lots of free time to get some of the back log of to do's done.

New hard drive

I filled up the hard drive on my laptop. Boy did that space go quickly. 60G gone over about 6 months use. I would normally have backed up things on my Linux box. I also wouldn't have downloaded songs for storage onto the laptop. But, since I can't get the laptop to talk with the Linux server, I am stuck with a rapidly filling hard drive. I just received a new 120G drive and am in the process of moving the data around. In essence this involves copying the entire contents of my hard drive onto another computer then swapping drives then moving everything onto the new drive. Hopefully I won't have to reinstall OS X but that might have to happen. I think this weekend that I will also try to boot up the old G4 Mac and try to get that computer to talk with the Linux server. If I can get the two of them to talk over the network, I might be able to off load from the laptop to the G4 then from G4 to Linux, painful but at least I will have backed things up. I guess I could just burn things onto a CD and have a secondary backup.