Archive for the 'Mac' Category
I woke up yesterday to my Apple TV not working quite right with content that wasn’t stored on the Apple TV’s local hard drive. I had a bridal shoot to do for my Fruitful Studios gig so I didn’t really have much time to do any troubleshooting.
The shoot started at my house using my portable studio/backdrop. Before we headed downtown I decided to take a look at my MacBook to see what was going on. The laptop’s screen was gray… Hmmm… I held down the power button and the system shut down. I pressed the power button again and on the laptop came, taking forever to bring the Apple logo up and the process gear.
When the logo and gear did show up, it was on the screen forever. I repeated the nifty little power off, power on routine several times and had the same results. By this time, it was time for me to head out with the bride to be and do some more shooting. I left the laptop on while I was gone with the Apple logo and gear displayed and the gear was just a spinning…
When I got back from the shoot, my laptop screen had the lovely logon dialog box on it with my blue background! Praise God!!! w00t! And all that… But, when I tried to logon, the “beach ball” just spun and never did anything. At this point, I noticed the wonderful sound of metal on metal grinding… Any techie probably can guess what that meant…
I tried the whole power off and power on thing a few more times until I finally got a different image on the grey background instead of the Apple logo: it was a nifty folder icon with a question mark on it… Any Mac fans care to guess what this means? That’s right, kids. The system can’t find a bootable system partition… Great fun! My hard drive is trash!!!
That’s right. The Hitachi Travelstar™ (Model: HTS541616J9SA00) 160GB, 5400RPM hard drive I had in my MacBook bit it… hard! Thankfully, I backup all of my critical data, but one thing I don’t backup is my Applications folder… Crap!
I purchased a 320GB Western Digital (Part number goes here when I can find the box) drive from Best Buy, slapped it in, and started the rebuilding process… This could take a while… From now on, I will be using the Time Machine feature built-in to Leopard… Time Machine supposedly backups all data on your Mac, making it extremely simple to restore a machine easily and quickly…
Hopefully, I won’t have any more hard drive failures, but if I do, maybe Time Machine can save the day…
Until next time…
Well, the upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard went smoothly, as Wooley predicted in his comment on my previous post.
The whole upgrade took about an hour and 15 minutes (which included verifying the install DVD) on my MacBook. I now am running the latest and greatest version of Apple’s OS, a certified flavor of UNIX, and am, so far, extremely impressed. The dock is beautiful, Stacks look extremely useful and efficient, there are a lot of desktop customizable features, Spaces (which I am looking forward to setting up soon), and more.
I look forward to getting a bit more intimate better acquainted with Leopard in the upcoming days and months. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly. If you’re scared, don’t be. Mine was a breeze! I just wish I had upgraded the day this package arrived on my doorstep…
uname Output:
% uname -a
Darwin xbook 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Until next time…
I have had Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X, Leopard, since it launched a couple of weeks ago. I used my in-store credit from my iPhone purchase reimbursement from when I purchased my iPhone 45 days too early for the price drop… or something… Anyway, I got Leopard and tonight I’m gonna install it!
Backups are running as we speak… I’m jonesing as we speak… I’m ready to install this new OS!!!! I’ll let you know how it goes…
Until next time…
Well, well, well… I woke up bright and early this morning at 7:15AM and went to the good ole’ MacBook and had a message from a buddy of mine from Spain. He sent me a message about the iPhone being $399.00 USD. Well, I looked it up and here is the proof. How disgusting! I mean, like, 40-45 days ago I paid $200.00 USD more than that for the 8GB iPhone… Oh, well… I guess you have to pay to play…
While I was digging around on Apple’s Web site I noticed that they did unveil another iPod called the iPod Touch.. This is an iPhone without the iPhone. Nice! Great design though… I mean, if the iPhone is beautiful then this little device is beautiful… It just looks really bare without the additional icons that the iPhone has… Again… Oh, well….
$399.00?!?!?!?!?!???!!!?!??!!!!?!?!!!oneone
Until next time…
I am working on a Web site and needed to use part of the client’s logo for the site’s Favicon. Since I work on a Mac, I needed something that was quick and easy without a lot of fluff… I mean, come on… I just need to convert a A
I stumbled upon this nifty command-line tool called png2ico. Did you hear me say “command-line”?! You know what that means, right?! Just issue a simple command on the command-line and you’re in business. This is exactly what I needed!
I downloaded the source and was about to compile it when I decided to see if it was already in the MacPorts collection of third-party Unix applications. GUess what?! After running % sudo port selfupdate to get my MacPorts up to date, I ran % port search png2ico and this was returned:
% port search png2ico
png2ico graphics/png2ico 2002-12-08 Converts PNG files to Windows icon resource files.
Great! After running % sudo port install png2ico I was in business. I quickly ran % png2ico favicon.ico favicon.png (where favicon.ico is the output file and favicon.png is my input file) and I had my conversion done in a matter of milliseconds…
If you need to quickly convert PNG image files to ICO image files on a Unix or Mac system, give this utility a try. No bulky UIno , fancy command line switches, just the basics to convert your file. Nice!
Until next time…
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