Able Mac

Time Machine is the "Defining Feature" of OS X Leopard (10.5). There were a lot of improvements in OS X, but Time Machine alone would have made it worth the cost of upgrading. It's brain dead simple. Plug in an external drive that's dedicated for Backups, and say yes when Leopard asks you if you want to use it for that.

But then there are those of us who don't want to have to plug in a hard Disk drive (HDD) to back up, let alone leave it plugged in to get the most out of Time Machine.

Blender 2.45 works extremely well on the new 17 inch MacBook Pro 2.5 GHz with 2 Gigs RAM and 512 MB video RAM.

Here is a sample Render of the TWiT logo with a Skull from the BlenderNation Blender model repository(just to be distinctive):

I just got an itch to be "clever" with perl, so I decided to try to write the smallest perl script I could. I put the requirement that it had to be executable from the command without calling perl directly (windows was outside the scope of this project :). It also had to output something somewhere to verify that it actually did something.

I'm brain storming combinations for an ultra geek home office.

So lets say a person has an old laptop, and a newer, but standard level MacBook (non-Pro).

Let's give this office a secretary who happens to be trained in the Microsoft Corporate solutions like Outlook and the rest of MS Office.

Now let's add to our goals a desire to use the HDTV in the Living Room with iTunes content (Rented, Purchased, Free from the web, and self created).

Since the video is too wide to fit in the normal blog post, I've slapped together a quick page to view the video on.

Quick Bento Demo (click to watch)

There's a new Time Machine menu in the Menu Bar:

The new Time Machine menu bar menu has a "Back Up Now" option, however, they did not add a backup now button to the System Preferences Pane for Time Machine. So if you uncheck the "Show Time Machine status in the menu bar" option, you can't start a "Back Up Now".

See attached image for full size.

Able

Recently I installed 2 different distros of Linux on my 80 Gig model PS3 (Christmas 2007) . Both Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) and the community favorite Ubuntu take a long time to install (almost 1hr) and then don't perform very well. They feel slugish, like running Windows XP on and 133 MHz Pentium II laptop.

I love the Invisible Shield products I have, and I'm not alone. They bring peace of mind and they are made of a high quality material. That said, the iPhone is not an easy shape to apply a sticker to. They've come up with an interestingly shaped precut sheet to try making that easier.

Who's Playing in Super Bowl 42 on Feb 3, 2008:
NYC Giants and New England Patriots (6:30 pm EST)

Obviously I'm not a big sports fan. I also don't watch TV, nor listen to much radio. I'm an internet centric kind of guy. So when our preacher told us from the pulpit today that it was Super Bowl Sunday, I was surprised that I hadn't heard about it loud and clear on the internet.

The Question: How do I get the installer for MySQL on OS X?

The sort Answer: Download the DMG file, run the install. Open System Preferences and click the "Start MySQL Server" button to start it. DONE. (On Leopard, apply the fix to get the System Preferences Pane working).