Wired Sage

Booting from External Hard Drives

I installed Snow Leopard on an external hard drive a few months ago to give it a once over.  My daughter then received a Macbook from Santa for Christmas and I got more exposure to the OS.  I felt it was time that I took the plunge and migrated all my data over to Snow Leopard.  I stopped using Tiger and started using Snow Leopard exclusively this past week.  I have a 750GB Seagate drive that currently has Snow Leopard on it.  Tiger is still installed on a mirrored RAID set composed of the internal 250GB drive and an external 250GB drive; so, if I needed to, I can roll back easily.

Migrating Data and Configurations

Most people will find that the Migration Assistant, found in the Utilities Folder (⌘-shift U shortcut in the finder application), will be able to handily migrate average user accounts and machine preferences from one disk to the other, or from an old computer to a newer one.  I first used this automated way to migrate the ‘other’ users of my system, my wife and children.  I chose to migrate my data manually because my home directory had 82GB of data in it.  60GB of which were in my iPhoto Library.

Program Migration

I had hundreds of programs installed in my Tiger OS that I just never used.  I’m going to install my programs on an As-Needed basis.  Currently, I have the software I use daily installed.  iLife ’09, Gimmer Proxy for Adblocking in Safari, CyberDuck, and a half dozen other programs I use regularly.  I think I’ve covered 80% of what I need currently.

Migrating iPhoto Data

Migrating iPhoto was the easiest task possible.  In your home directory /Users/YOURNAME there is a directory called Pictures.  Within the Pictures directory there is a special item called iPhoto Library.  It’s actually a directory that Apple has labeled as a package — you can right click on the item and “Show Package Contents” to navigate into it, but trust me, you don’t want to.  The only thing I had to do to move everything in iPhoto was to move this iPhoto Library file from one disk to the other.  Just place it in your /Users/YOURNAME/Pictures folder and you’re done.  Fire up iPhoto ’09 in Leopard and it automatically upgrades your iPhoto Library and you’re done.

iTunes

I have all my music on an external mirrored RAID set. I just needed to fire up iTunes, change the preferences to where my music library is, uncheck copy music to location, and in finger select all the subdirectories in the iTunes subdirectory and dump them into the Music Library area inside the iTunes program.  I lost all my ratings and such, but what are you going to do?

iMovie

I have all of my movies on an external mirrored RAID set also.  I only had to fire up iMovie and it found all my movies and optimized them automatically.

Mail Data Migration

So, this is a little embarrassing.  I have almost every email I’ve ever received going back about 15 years or more.  Again, a lot of data to move and the safest way to do that is to do it manually.  This was only slightly more difficult.  There was one folder, and one plist file to move into place.  The mail folder to move was /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Mail and the plist file was found at /Users/YOURNAME/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist.  After those files are moved to the new system, you fire up mail, and if you’re moving from Tiger to Snow Leopard, it automatically upgrades your mail archive.  You will have to type in your passwords again, but all your other settings, filters, signatures, etc. are saved.

Printer Configurations

I’m no where close to the bleeding edge on this migration.  As a matter of fact, I’m well behind the pack for a good reason.  I wanted other schmucks to figure out the difficult tricks to getting the supported peripherals in Tiger to work in Snow Leopard.  I had a slight issue with my Samsung ML-1710 Laser printer as it was no longer supported in OS X 10.6.  Not a really big deal, right?  Apple said, “see the manufacturers site for the updated driver.”   So, I moseyed over to Samsung and started searching and didn’t find a thing.  There was a “Live Chat” option, so I asked.  Nope, not supported.  The help desk person would send it up the food chain, as a request, but I needed to print now!  The printer doesn’t even support PCL or PS.  So I couldn’t even use a generic PCL4, PCL5 or PS driver.  Crap.  That was that, right?  Well, I don’t give up that easily… ever.

I kept searching.  Looking for cheap wireless print servers.  Thinking about tiny linux machines that I could use as a NAS and Print Server.  And then I found it.  A site that had instructions how to install foomatic print drivers in Mac OS X 10.5.  I thought to myself, it’s worth a try.  So I downloaded the links on the page.  Sadly there were broken links.  But I didn’t give up.  I copied the links, removed the filenames, and searched the internet directory looking for similar files.  Luckily, there were updated files!  I downloaded all three files, installed them, and my printer, which was not supported by either Apple or Samsung is now working again.  I saved these files to my site here so you’ll never run into broken links!

internet link: gplgs-8.64so-ub.dmg local link:  gplgs-8.64so-ub.dmg
internet link: foomatic-rip-4.0.2.211.dmg local link: foomatic-rip-4.0.2.211.dmg
internet link: samsung-gdi-1.816.2.dmg local link: samsung-gdi-1.816.2.dmg

I installed the above files in order.  First the GPL Ghost Script package, then the Foomatic package, then the Samsung drivers.  Afterwards, I opened System Preferences, clicked on Print & Fax, unlocked my preference panel, pressed the little + button in the middle on the left, and added my printer.  The driver automatically selected and came up as Samsung ML-1710 Foomatic/gdi.

Scanner Configuration

I know I’m going to have the same problem with my scanner, a Canon Canoscan LiDE 30.  It’s a great little scanner that I picked up years ago for $30.  I don’t want to upgrade it.  it does everything I want it to and it does it fast enough for me.  I’ve found a program that solves all my scanner problems, VueScan.  I just downloaded the demo and tested it out.  It supports my scanner without the need of installing drivers in Snow Leopard.  Can you ask for more?  And at $40 for the program, it’ll save me at least $30 and 2 lbs. of land-fill-guilt from my alternative of junking this scanner and buying another one.

Mission Completed

Upgrade completed.  I now have Snow Leopard installed on an external drive.  Now, I have to break my mirrored RAID set and reformat my internal hard drive (keeping the external hard drive intact with all it’s data for backup for right now).  This will allow me to image my current external drive to my internal drive moving my Snow Leopard disk into my iMac and finishing off the process completely.

This is the scary part.  I think I’ll sit on Snow Leopard for a week or so before proceeding, just to be safe.

Santa Clause brought a new 13″ macbook for my eldest daughter this year.  He was kind enough to set up most of the laptop for her, but left a few tasks for me to tackle after the holiday.  One of which was email.

Apple Mail has some wonderful Parental Controls allowing the parental units to define a white list of who the child can exchange email with.  Fantastic Stuff!  But my problem was my daughter has an email address from one of my google apps domains.  I needed to figure out a way for her to ONLY use Apple Mail and not login to Google via the web to circumvent those Apple parental protections.

I decided just on a monster password that she doesn’t know.  One that she will not be able to remember or type in.  We’re talking 35 characters long, upper case, lower case, numbers, and special characters.  It’s not a perfect solution.  The password is saved in the Keychain, and she can get it out of there, when she figures it out, but it seemed like a good compromise for now.

I could blacklist the URL for gmail so she can’t access her email via the web on her computer.  But, that won’t stop her from accessing her email  from another computer if she can figure out how to get the password off her macbook.

I’ll do some more investigation around this later.  It would be nice if Google allowed an account to ONLY be accessed via IMAP.  I’ll look into if that’s an option today, and if not, I’ll ask Google for the feature.  I think it would be a nice option to have.

Yesterday we also set up iChat, so now we have a video intercom in our house.  It’s funny to video chat when your kids just down the hall.  She is completely enamored with the Alpha Channel options in Snow Leopard’s iChat.  We need to get a green screen now.

The chair, desk and apple macbook are all new for Christmas.

My eldest Daughter got a MacBook from Santa this year.  A little 13″ solid plastic uni-body MacBook with a clear protective cover.  Yes, she’s only 9 years old.  Yes, she really does need it for school.  She attends a magnet school and is currently making straight A’s in one of the toughest/best public schools in the state. Santa did right by her this year.

In comparison, I was 12 years old when I purchased my very first computer, a Commodore Vic 20, back in 1981.  I got it from K-Mart for $125.  Money I had earned working paper routes with the Atom Tabloid and Star Ledger — my mother lied for me so I could get the Atom Tabloid job a year early.  In NJ the child labor laws mandated a kid be 12 before they could earn an official taxable wage.  Meh!

So, I got a computer at 12 years old and taught myself to program.  By 13 I was an old hack.  By 14 I was soldering external sensors to my Vic 20′s RS232 serial port.  I think having that computer experience got me where I am today — from the Vic 20 to Facebook.  I had to poke fun at Facebook, I just had to. 

I didn’t grow up with a computer, like both of my kids did.  I didn’t figure out how a mouse worked at the age of two just from sitting on my father’s lap and watching him work like my kids both did.  It’s intuitive to them.  It’s second nature.  Plus they’ve been hogging my wife’s PC and my Mac far too much for far too long.  I think Santa did my wife and me right.

So, it’s now the day after Christmas 2009 and I’m looking through my employee benefits sites at work trying to find the “$10 Office 2008 for Mac” deal that a co-worker told me about this past summer.  All of my daughter’s school work is done in Word, Excel or Power Point.  She knows Power Point so well, she’s been tutoring her fourth grade teacher on how to use it.  I got her hooked on the Mac with iLife.  I knew I wasn’t going to win any awards forcing her to learn iWork.  So I just got her the Microsoft Programs for the Mac.  She even agreed to split the $10 licensing fee I had to pay.  What a good kid.

But it took me ALL DAY!  The house was a mess.  Leslie and I are both sleep deprived.  I’m fighting a cold.  Holidays are getting rougher in our old age.  The kids were acting bratty.  There were 100+ interruptions — to a computer geek interruptions are like ice picks in the eyes; nothing is more annoying than an interruption when you are trying to get something complex done right.  Ugh!

Finally though, I finished installing all of the work on her computer.  I’m pretty proud of myself too.  Aside from the programs for school she also has the iLife suite, Voice Candy, and two Luxor games to play with.  It’s under complete Parental Control.  I’m using the Mac Parental Controls in conjunction with Open DNS which will also filters out nasty domains (phishing and maleware as well as sites that are not child friendly).  With a little Remote Desktop magic I can also view her screen in a window on my iMac’s 2nd monitor to make sure she’s doing her homework when she should be doing her homework.  Time limits keep her from spending more than 4 hours a day on the machine and will force her to logout at bed time, and she can’t login again till morning.  So there will be no late night net parties in her room any time soon.

My next plan is to show her the address book on the machine.  I’ll have her convert our old paper address book to the Mac format, then I’ll be able to port it into my machine with ease.  It’s a win-win.  She’ll love typing in all the information and using the Address Book program.  She’ll love having all that contact information at her fingertips.  And I’ll get to benefit from her labors.

Tomorrow we have to work on integrating Google email with Snow Leopard’s Mail and resolving the Parental Permission issues around that.  Tomorrow should be both fun and interesting.

The world has officially come to an end.  The seas have turned blood red, the sky is on fire, and I hear the hoofs of the four horsemen approaching.  I joined Facebook today.

I have always felt that Facebook has it’s place for those who are not gifted with mad-uber-tech and zen-computer-fu skillz.  I never felt a need to join Facebook because I figured that if you knew me, you knew this is my web site (it’s on the bottom of all of my personal emails — just a click away) and you had all my contact information… if  you wanted to talk you just had to send me an email, video chat with me (skype, AOL or Yahoo!), or just use the phone — I’m in the book.  And here, on my own personal domain, in my own little electronic kingdom, I control my privacy completely.  If you don’t know me, my personal information on this site is pretty sparse and I feel confident that you’re not using this site as a resource to stalk me or my family.

Over the years I’ve gotten many friend requests for Facebook and for one reason or another I didn’t join.  Reasons included requests sent to my work email address, personal privacy issues, my impression that Facebook was just another re-branded version of MySpace, and Facebooks own EULA.  My content, whether you find it to be inane drivel or not, is mine and I will not grant license to any company or organization to use it as their own.  Ever!  The only thing left that we can honestly claim as our own is what we think, feel and say.  There’s no way I’m giving that up to a corporation.  Then again, I’m jaded.  I’ve seen people lose their reputations on-line.  I’ve seen people lose their jobs on-line.  I’ve seen people lose their identities on-line.  I’ve seen people lose their life savings on-line.  I’ve seen people lose their children on-line.  The Internet is a lot like New Jersey, it’s got it’s really nice parts, and it’s got drawbacks, and it’s got it’s really bad parts… except the bad parts of the Internet are way worse than Newark ever was.

So, now that you know my true, honest feelings about Facebook, I’m sure you are wondering, “Why the hell did you sign up?” Well, my brother came over for Christmas and, as a Facebook addict, he had to get on my iMac to tag someone’s wall.  I gave him the bah-humbug-facebook-shpil and he said, “Naw! You gatta look here… check this out.” So he gave me the tour.  Everything I’ve seen before except one thing.  One thing made me say, “Crap!  I have to join Facebook now!”

My 89 year old Aunt was on Facebook!

So, I read the EULA again, and three sections of it turned my stomach.  But, my 89 year old Aunt Edna on Facebook outweighed the drawbacks enough to make me join.  So I’ve joined, but there is no way I’m uploading any content of any considerable value to their site.  If you desire anything of substance from me, if you want to read anything other than a “LOL! you goof!” or a “Yeah, we need to grab a beer this weekend.” you’ll have to read it here.  Where, for whatever it’s worth, I own it.  It’s mine, all mine.

With that said, Facebook gets a minimum amount of personal information about me.  If you know me and friend me on Facebook, you’ll always have a quick, easy link to this website and you’ll always have a link to my photo gallery.

Well, that all happened.  It’s all true.  But there was something else.  Aunt Edna was the #1 reason I joined Facebook.  But there was one more thing that tipped the scales in favor of signing up at Facebook — Google Wave.  Google Wave integrates with Facebook.  So I don’t actually have to login to Facebook to participate in the conversations there.  I can do it all remotely, from Google Wave.  That to me is just cool.  I’ve grown to be a google fanboy of sorts, and anything that makes me use Google Wave more, can’t be a bad thing.

Google Wave might actually get me to sign up for Twitter too…

If you haven’t heard, the next big WAVE in computing has hit.  Google Wave, that is.  I got my invitation this week and jumped in.  I found several of my uber-techie friends had also been invited and were already there, active, in my contacts list.  It’s amazing what they have done.

Check out the link which describes what Google Wave is.  And request an account from Google — you’ll be glad you did.