Category Archives: mac life

Spam has increased over the last week, I assume because of trolling for holiday shoppers. Lots of designer knock-offs and sports jerseys. Does anyone ever really click on those links?

Thanking the internetz for Akismet. Again.

Went a little nuts over the last 24 hours looking for my most recent royalty statement. I mean, I remembered sitting at the kitchen table and reading the thing a couple of weeks ago. Remembered setting it aside because I didn’t want to file it with the tax stuff.

There were three places it could have been–office, kitchen, filebox, and I tore the whole lot of them apart last night, then again over lunch and a third time after I got home from work tonight. Had I left the statement folded in the agency’s distinctively-colored envelope, or had I trashed said envelope? Had the statement gotten mixed up with three months’ worth of puppy medical records? It got to the point that I cleaned out the spare room so that I would be able to set stacks of docs on the bed and hunt through them page by page. Half a dozen blankets and comforters got lugged downstairs to the basement. Two brand-new pairs of running shoes were moved to my closet. Clothes were consigned to the laundry basket.

Found the printer manual–go me!

I found other papers I needed over the course of the search, but no royalty statement. After yet another go at the kitchen table, I went back to the filebox, which I keep by the living room desk. The top of the desk was pretty clean, relatively speaking–atomic clock, small lamp, box of envelopes…

…and tucked beneath said box, a distinctively-colored envelope that I completely missed seeing each of the 4-5 times I went to the desk to hunt through the filebox. Was it? Was it?

Yes! Statement!! Bloody thing.

It was actually a good thing that I cleaned out the spare room. Still need to get way too many messenger bags and handbags off the floor.

Amazing how a hunt for something chews up the evening.

In other news, back-ups. I had been using Time Machine since June. But I use it with an Extreme Base Station, and it’s my understanding that Apple doesn’t support that arrangement–I should be using Time Capsule, but I’ve read that they fail after a couple of years. There’s also the fact that TM seems to be one hell of a resource hog. Maybe my poor 5 yo Macbook is to blame, but these past 5 months on TM have been filled with hard drive racing and system stalling and crashing if I tried to open up Mail or a browser while TM was running.

I set up a Dropbox account months ago, and was also thinking of looking into Carbonite or something similar. But I use Intego Antivirus, and realized that one of the features is a Personal Backup system. I’d been staring at the little life preserver in the Macbook dock for a couple of years, but never opened it because I didn’t need it. Last night, I decided to give it a try.

It’s like a throwback to my late lamented .Mac Backup. Very simple set-up–I specify the files I want to save, the place I want to save them, and how often. I set up the wip to save to Dropbox every 2 hours, and it zipped through the process without racing or stalling. Most important files saved off site, and everything else left alone.

I will still perform full system backups every so often using TM. But I’ll use Personal Backup for everyday.

Adjusting to Time Machine, which essentially means that I check it every so often to make sure it actually is working, which it is. The external HD’s proprietary software does not work with Tiger OS, but I have not yet determined whether that means I cannot backup my iBook** as long as I use Time Machine and not said proprietary software. Given that I don’t use the iBook for much other than web surfing, it wouldn’t be a great loss. The lettering on the keyboard is wearing out and some of the keys require a harder touch, including the space bar, which means that I’ll type a sentence without looking and find that half the words are run together because space bar didn’t. So it’s definitely a backup machine of last resort, but even so. Still nice to have around Just In Case, which means at some point I will check to see if it works with TM.

I just really wish that my Airport Extreme router had more than one USB port. I mean, it has three Firewire ports, none of which I have ever used. But if I had two USB ports, I could hook up old and new external HDs and MacBook and iBook in one big home network which I would never use to capacity what still what the hell at least I would have done it. Non-techie, me, which means I feel a sense of accomplishment when I manage to muddle through things that techie friends could do in their sleep.

I think old external HD has a firewire cable. Given that it’s ages old, the carton no longer exists, and any other cords and other bits it had were added to the general mess years ago, I don’t know if I could find it even if it did exist. Are FW cables pretty much interchangeable? Because I know I have them. I just don’t remember where they came from.

Beautiful day here–sunny, high of 80F expect. Had breakfast out on the deck, and am now debating whether to set up the deck brollie now or wait until the sun comes up over the oaks.

There is not a cloud in the sky.

Quiet Sunday morning. Hope it stays that way.

**which was named Spike but which I believe I will rename Rip van Winkle or Methuselah