So its been over a month of using my Mac Mini. It’s been a good experience. I find myself missing the Expose feature whenever I’m on my PC now. I bought Leopard but have resisted upgrading until all the kinks are worked out. So for now I’m using Tiger. I ended up ordering a 2GB RAM upgrade. I finally got the memory today and did the upgrade. The process wasn’t too bad. Except the part where I had to pry open the cover of the system using a putty knife. I was convinced that I must have broken something but luckily I didn’t. Maybe a little scratches here and there. But nothing too bad. Everything was documented on the 123macmini.com site where they had people making videos on how to dissect the little machine.
The upgrade was definitely worth it. Now I can run Parallels and other applications without any hiccups. The Parallels Windows instance loads up much faster now that I’ve allocated 1GB of RAM for the Virtual Machine. I must admit, this has been a pleasant experience using my Mac. Adding this much memory has made this machine shine. Things not only “just work”, they work responsively too. Let’s just say my next laptop will definitely be a MacBook Pro of some sort.
So I was surfing around the 123MacMini site and found a reference relating to a software called Synergy. I was in the photo gallery for Mac Mini Setup and came across a person’s setup. Apparently there is a way to control multiple computers with multiple monitors using one set of keyboard and mouse. Further investigation yield an article from from LifeHacker describing on how to do this. You basically use the network connectivity between all your machines and setup a client-server with Synergy. You can also copy and paste clipboard items in between each system.
This is going to be perfect for work! I have a Dell Dimension and a Mac Mini at work with 2 huge monitors. One CRT 21″ and one Apple cinema display. I’m using 2 keyboards and 2 mice. The PC is strictly for work while the mini is for personal and when I need to do Internet research. According to the people who replied on LifeHacker, it has improved the productivity to those who used this software. Exciting stuff to say the least. This will be the first thing I’ll do when I get in tomorrow. What a good start to a Monday morning. 
*10/23/2007: Synergy worked like a charm. I am now using 1 keyboard and mouse across 2 machines. This is so cool!
So I find on the Internet that Apple recently released a video tour of the next Mac OSX operating system, Leopard. I have to tell ya. Seeing someone using some of those features makes me want that new operating system much sooner than the October 26th release date. Don’t know what it is. It’s like being brain-washed by the company. I can’t wait to use features like “Time-Machine” for back-ups and “Spaces” for desktop management (similar to many Linux GUI interface).
I found myself perusing their website for more of these videos and saw one for iLife. OMG, this was a good one. I was almost going to dismiss the entire iLife application to be something cool and may one day use it. But after watching this video, I wanted to jump on and begin managing my pictures better with iPhoto. The video showed the basics of using the application and got me up and running. So tonight I spent my time importing all my pictures into iPhoto. I have to say the software is very well thought out. I mean I imported an entire folder of albums and it knew that each folder was an album for a particular event and automatically created “Events” for each sets of folders. Amazing to say the least. I think I’m finally getting why Apple products are such fan favorites. For example, things like knowing when to turn on and off when you insert and remove your headphones on your iPod is awesome! They really thought about their products before they even begin building it. That attention to details and making everything so damn easy to use, really wins over demanding users like myself. It’s so hard to not want to use an Apple system now. I find myself missing things like Expose when I’m on the PC. Damn you Apple for brain-washing me!
My free time has been completely consumed with 3 things this week.
- Radiohead‘s In Rainbows album
- My new Mac Mini
- My new Uninterruptible Power Supply
I did get some Halo 3 in the mix but I must digress. In Rainbows has been playing non-stop on my work computers and my iPod. The more I listen to this album, the more I love it. Yes that’s right, love it! I find myself looking forward to Jigsaw Falling Into Places everytime the album loops around. I still haven’t decided if this is top 3 of my RH albums. It’s so hard because the more you listen to it, the more you enjoy an album. This happened to Amnesiac and Kid A. I didn’t like those album at first but when I started to listen to them more and more, it grew on me. In my opinion In Rainbows is another masterpiece.
I used the hell out of my Mac Mini this week. It’s been on 5 days straight. I’ve been making it my own by installing various freeware and testing out Parallels. I got my laptop’s WinXP loaded on my my Mac Mini. Only thing left is to get an activation key from Microsoft. My iTunes is setup similar to my PC but I don’t think I’m going to reformat my iPod with the Mac. The PC has all the interesting historical data like the star ratings and the times I’ve played a song. It’s so stupid how little things like that makes such a good experience in using an iPod. Moving it over to the Mac is a cumbersome task. My entire library is on my Linux fileserver.
I also had to replace my UPS this weekend. I got it setup but was interested in getting it to shutdown my server in the event of a power failure. The model I got was an APC BACK UPS XS 900. It came with software for Macs and PCs. Unfortunately none for Linux. I found out that there is an open-source solution called apcupsd. It basically are scripts that allows you to do shutdowns for APC branded UPS. I also found that people have used my UPS with this software solution successfully. I installed the source code and compiled it. Everything is working fine, I think. I’m in the middle of running various tests. So far it passed the few early tests. I need to simulate a complete power failure and see if it shuts down my server. May not sound fun to you but gobs of fun for a geek like me.
It’s official! Just picked up my first Apple system. I got myself a Mac Mini with a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz processor, 1Gb of memory, and 120Gb hard drive.
Finally did it after a couple months of contemplating. I’ve been actively using a mini at work but it’s an old G4. Now I need to get Windows XP running on it.
I got my Seagate 160GB laptop hard drive on Friday in the mail. Needless to say I was looking forward to bump my storage needs from a maxed out 25GB factory drive. I bought the drive refurbished from Computer Geeks online. It cost me about $100 which was alot cheaper than many of newer drives out there even in eBay. What began as a task that I was looking forward to in the week, finally ended now at Sunday evening. Copying a hard drive may seem to be a trivial task, since many people would just reformat and reinstall the operating system and all your software. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to retain the same exact settings from my previous hard drive and did not want to go through reinstalling. I hate starting over when I don’t have to.
Back when I first worked as a System Administrator, I use to configure and build out similar laptops by first installing and setup 1 laptop with the exact software and settings required. I would then use, at the time, Norton Ghost to image the entire hard drive and saved the image on a server somewhere on our network and then use that image to duplicate on laptops with the same hardware. It was the coolest thing back then and would save alot of time versus setting up and installing manually. I did a quick Google search for “free hard drive cloning” which yielded several references to 2 free Linux-based solutions: Gparted and Partimage. They were both part of a live CD called SystemRescueCD. You use Gparted to setup your new hard drive’s partition and use Partimage to clone and restore a partition.
I could go through the excruciating tasks I had to endure but I’ll save that pain and give you a brief summary of what worked for me.
- Cloned all three of my partitions from my smaller hard drive to my Linux file server. I did this by booting up the live CD and issuing the following commands:
mkdir /mnt/samba
mount -t smbfs -o username:johnny //192.168.0.xxx/johnny /mnt/samba
partimage -z1 /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz
I had to turn on DHCP on the rescuecd start-up prompt by executing the command rescuecd dodhcp
- Physically installed my new hard drive.
- Executed the following command at the start-up prompt:
rescuecd dodhcp dostartx This started the X-Windows with a valid network connection.
- I then used Gparted to partition all my partitions exactly the same as my previous hard drive. This step is important since I actually jumped the gun and partitioned the main boot drive to fill-up the disc’s maximum capacity. This rendered the partition unreadable from Windows XP. It only saw the original 25GB and not the 140GB. I also turned on the “boot” flag for the main partition that had Windows XP and turned the “hidden” flag on the other 2 partitions that wasn’t there in my original drive.
- I then started the x-term window and executed the command:
partimage restore /dev/hda1 /mnt/samba/location/to/image/folder/clonefilename.gz.000. I did this for each 3 partitions.
- After all my data was restored, I rebooted the system into Windows XP.
- Windows XP sees the new drive and ask to reboot the system once again after it automatically installed the drive.
- I reboot again into SystemRescueCD and ran the previous command to start X-windows and DHCP.
- I opened up Gparted and chose to resize my partition from 25GB to the remaining unallocated disk space.
- I rebooted to XP again.
- XP automatically jumped into CHKDSK mode and revalidated the hard drive space.
- XP then boots into the operating system and finds the new hard drive. I then asked for me to reboot my system once again. I obliged.
- Voila! My new C: drive is now 140GB.
I probably left out alot of details but the general idea is captured here. I tried so many ways of setting this up which included an attempt to use 1 large partition, setting up a larger partition for the boot partition, etc. All this did was give me blank screens with a flashing prompt. I was never able to boot-up using the other methods. But when I finally followed the steps above, I was successful.
Just a bit of a warning. I’ve been using Linux for over 8 years now so I know my way around the operating system. Doing this requires alot of patience. Hopefully I did most of the grunt work for those who stumble upon this post to use.
My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600. The other 2 partitions are backup crap that Dell installs with every new laptop. I tried so hard to not include them in my new hard drive. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that. C’est la vie.
As our society steer themselves away from being dependent on gasoline, I find myself wondering if there was a 2 wheel alternative than the ever popular hybrid cars on the roads. Apparently there will be a fully electrical motorcycle available for my fancy. The company Bammo Motorsports created the first cool looking electric motorcycle called the Enertia. The bike has similar power to riding a Kawasaki 250 motorcycle but without the noise, feel, and smell of a standard motorcycle. You can drive 40-50 miles between charges and charging takes only 2 hours for a 80% charge and 3 hours for complete charge.
Obviously, you would not try to take it out on a major highway. This would be so cool to ride around town locally. A much better alternative than a scooter with their beefy suspension and fat tires. The price ranges from $12-15K and will be available next year.
I was listening to TWIT’s 100th episode this weekend and they had mentioned Drobo. Drobo is a new USB hard drive which uses a much more intelligent way of protecting your data. They claim that it is a robot that manages the best use of your hard drive. It will shrink and expand your disk space as soon as you add or remove a drive from your array. It is also not picky of the size and brand of hard drives that gets inserted into the disk array. Just as long as it is 3.5″ drive with SATA interface.
This got me excited since my Raid-1 Linux server at home is close to 60% of capacity. This is only a 200GB file server. I figure I should be in the market for this or similarily a NAS device like Infrant’s ReadyNAS NV+. I stumbled upon an entry in the blogosphere from isnoop.net which briefly goes over the differences of each devices. One of the things I wish the Drobo would have is NAS capability so I can just plug this into my network and give access to multiple systems much like my Linux file server. The negative for ReadyNAS is that it won’t use all the available disk space if you had put in bigger disks. It would just use the least common denominator and default to the smallest disk size. Both negativity are critical in my opinion and I have decided that I will wait later to consider a new storage solution. I also read on drobospace.com that you can use an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station to attach the Drobo and have it serve like a file server. That wouldn’t work since I just got a new wireless access point.
What I have to consider is that if I replace my Linux server, I wouldn’t have the ability to offset any other features my Linux box gave me like bittorrent downloading. Yup, I even looked to see if the Drobo was Linux compatible. It is possible but not built in natively. Hopefully the NAS version of Drobo is coming out sometime soon. *Crossing my fingers*
I was listening to the latest TWIT podcast and they had mentioned a pretty cool application. It is the Zarate Labs Password Generator. This thing is a bookmarklet which resides on your browser to help you maintain your passwords. You basically right click on the bookmarklet link and save it as a Favorite or Bookmark (depending on which browser you’re using). When you are adding or updating a website’s password and before you change the password, you would go to that Favorite or Bookmark. This will bring up a pop-up. Just enter you new password phrase and have that generate the new 7 character password.
So what’s so great about this application? This basically allows you to create a new “hardened” password based off of a simple word. This will allow you to use a public machine without any worries of people knowing what the real password is (just remember to delete the bookmarklet when you’re done). You can change your password as much as possible. Hackers won’t be able to run a program against a dictionary if you have a password that contains words. It works on both Macs and PCs. I even added this to my links page.
If you’re seeing this post, you’re on my new server. Welcome! I just moved over from my old host to this one. That’s why I haven’t been posting as frequently as I wanted to. Thank you Techsoluxions for providing hosting. This move will allow me to separate my “business” from my “play” and allow me to post pictures liberally. At least I know how to migrate so if I need to move, I can do it without hesitation.
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