Messages

1

2007 / Planning for the catastrophe

« on: October 13, 2007, 11:34:12 PM »

Why yes I do live on the range. Literally thousands of acres of corn and beans around me most of the year.  We have a microwave also, and twelve cars in the barn.

    Regardless of which computer you use, the iMac or the laptop, you will be using the assistant on the new to you iMac. I guess I really don't see the problem if you are taking the old computer along with you anyway for the migration.  If you need to wipe the drive before giving the computer away, use Carbon Copy Cloner to move it (a copy of your iMac) to a firewire external drive configured as a startup disk, and when you are starting up your new iMac, hook up the external drive instead of the old iMac.  I've done this with CCC and the migration assistant from time to time.  

    I hope the migration goes well for you.  I'm sure you will get through it smoothly. It's only a computer.

    Best,

    Ken

2

2007 / Planning for the catastrophe

« on: October 13, 2007, 05:14:39 PM »

Upgrading your mac to a new one probably seems a little scary, but the process went smoothly for me last week.  I've retired my 867mhz Quicksilver and bought a new intel 17" MacBook Pro to replace it.  The old Quicksilver had at least seven years of everything from pro to shareware programs and prefs on the old 80gig primary drive, and migration assistant brought them all over to the "book" with very few issues.  

I did have to authorize my iTunes account with the new computer, and most of my programs even showed up correctly on the dock abiet there were about four question marks that resolved by clicking on them.  I guess some with the question marks just needed to be run the first time.  Fireworks and Dreamweaver remembered their keys along with Acrobat and Office 2004.  I had some programs like fetch, and entourage, ask for permissions to the keychain which went ok, and that was about it.  

For the most part the migration assistant worked fine.  I keep my documents externally in FW drives and my iPod as I do a lot of moving around so they weren't an issue, but I wouldn't have expected them to be much of a problem anyway.  BTW, the "book" does a pretty good job as a desktop when hooked up to the 30" display and keyboard.  It's perkier than the Quicksilver even with it's processor upgrade.

Take a big breath and go for the new computer with confidence.  Of course, your mileage may vary, but we've moved my son's really old blue iMac over to one of the new white/black ones and the seven year old QS as related above without really much of a problem.  The new migration assistant seems to have most of the bugs worked out of it.  BTW all systems were running 10.4.10.

Hope it goes as well for you.

3

2007 / OT (sort of): GPS Navigation System for Cars

« on: March 02, 2007, 12:56:58 PM »

FWIW, I tried both the Garmin and the Tom Tom in cars driving, and thought the Garmin easier to program, and the driving software was far superior to the Tom Tom.  The TT was about $100 cheaper at the time, which is a big advantage, but for the quality of the software, I went for the Garmin.  My wife who is somewhat technology challenged manages to use it to find garage sales!

The software is the difference.  There's a reason they are the oldest in the GPS business and have tried to make their software as user friendly as possible.  The downside is that though they have proported to have Mac friendly software available to update Points of interest and map routes, they still have not released it.  At this time, you will need a Win machine to do any updating.

Best,

Ken

4

2006 / 90% of all e mail is spam!

« on: December 07, 2006, 09:45:58 PM »

Slightly off topic,

I just tripped across this on another forum and thought about the problem some of you are experiencing with Junk/Spam email. I know that a lot of spam is triggered by participation in a site that offers something that you want but requires an email account to get it.  Here's a tool that can be used to satisfy that without risking your "primary" email address.

According to Ten Minute Email: you will be given a temporary e-mail address. Any
e-mails sent to that address will show up automatically on the web page. You can
read them, click on links, and even reply to them. The e-mail address will
expire after 10 minutes.

Why would you use this? Maybe you want to sign up for a site which requires that
you provide an e-mail address to send a validation e-mail to. And maybe you
don't want to give up your real e-mail address and end up on a bunch of spam
lists. This is nice and disposable. And it's free.

If this info has appeared here before, I apologize in advance for the re-posting.  I guess I must admit that I do just scan posts and only read the ones that I relate to.

Here's the link:
http://www.10minutemail.com/10MinuteMail/index.html

5

2006 / Firefox 2.0 Update

« on: October 30, 2006, 03:12:15 PM »

These are great ideas.  With my t-Book and Aluminum P-Books, I'm limited to the touchpad and one button.  Short of plugging in an external mouse and loosing a USB port, I would like to restore the missing features.  It's the main reason I moved from Safari as my main browser.  Too many Ctl clicks to get things done.


I'll give your suggestions a try on my t-book first and then if things go well, I'll do the 15" Pbook.  Thanks for the info.  It looks like a good place to start until FF responds to the people's wishes.

Best,

Ken

6

2006 / Firefox 2.0 Update

« on: October 30, 2006, 12:27:47 PM »

For me FF 2.0 is a mixed bag.  I like the integrated spell check, but browsing with a single button mouse is more difficult.  I miss double clicking on a tab to open a new one, clicking and holding on links doesn't open a new tab like in 1.5 and finally each tab requires you to mouse over to it's own "X" to close it where in 1.5 you could just go to the end of the tab  bar and close each one by multiple clicks on the fixed "X".


Maybe I'm just in a rut, but the old version just seemed easier to surf with.  I was able to find a couple of themes that I could live with, and it has been a solid upgrade for me with no suprises.  I just did the normal install over 1.5 with no apparent issues over the last week or so.


If any of you FF guru's out there have solutions for the above single button issues (I hate using the ctl/click) let me know.

Thanks

Ken

7

2006 / Wireless connectivity

« on: October 21, 2006, 10:58:41 PM »

QUOTE(giantmike @ Oct 19 2006, 09:00 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hi Ken, sorry to here about your recent stay. I hope at least the hospital had a good Electronic Medical Records system in place (my current job is developing such software ).

What version of OS X do you have? I'm pretty sure that the WPA Enterprise was added either late in the 10.3.x versions, or early in the 10.4.x. I'm guessing that your OS wasn't updated to handle the new authentication methods.

Thanks for the thoughts.  I'm running 10.4.8 and I thought the latest airport drivers.  The IT guy at the hospital said that none of the Macs could log on to the system.  Windows XP does have the appropriate security patches though and apparently apple does not.  I wish I had more detailed info about the protocol they are running.  Just wanted to know if anyone else has a commercial security system that excludes Macs.

Best,

Ken

8

2006 / Wireless connectivity

« on: October 19, 2006, 01:27:18 PM »

I had to spend some time in the hospital recently (not life threatening) and had my laptop and there was a strong wireless signal.  Windows computers could log into the system, but my mac lacked the necessary protocol choice to access the network.  Anyone else run into this  I think it came up as "Enterprise"  Or WPAEP.  

Best,

Ken

9

2006 / New Board...growing pains!!!

« on: April 15, 2006, 06:18:04 PM »

Avatar Update:   Success!  Not a big thing, but a "thing" none the less.

Not sure what caused it, but today I tried about six times with FF and Saf to add my old avatar and still no dice.  Finally while still in Safari, I logged out and logged back in and went straight to "My Controls" and it took!  No error message either.  BTW, I'm getting that same error message:  IPB WARNING [2] (null)() [ref.outcontrol]: output handler 'ob_gzhandler' cannot be used twice (Line: 0 of Unknown) on the bottom of every page.  

Probably old news.  I can see you guys (N gals) are working hard getting the new format whipped into shape.  Good going.  I got the "Jungle" banner today and I'm looking forward to exploring.

10

2006 / New Board...growing pains!!!

« on: April 14, 2006, 11:07:02 PM »

Ah.  Back online.  Nice to see you up and running.  Lots of new stuff to see and get used to.  It allowed me to log in today (first time since the upgrade) It's nice to be remembered!  Not everything made the trip though.


Avatar issue:
Me too. Followed the thread to here and it appears that I'm not alone.  
My avatar   http://www.mirafiori.com/~kdickson/pics/comp.gif  for some reason won't fly.   It's only 72X70 at 72dpi.  Tried all the above fixes and even moved it around to a couple of different servers.  

Not sure if this helps, but this shows up at the bottom of my screen after the update script runs.  It appears to be an error message.

IPB WARNING [2] (null)() [ref.outcontrol]: output handler 'ob_gzhandler' cannot be used twice (Line: 0 of Unkno

11

2006 / Firefox update

« on: April 14, 2006, 10:31:04 PM »

rant/   Hey!  I was pretty miffed when I came down to the computer this morning and had a nice little window on my screen that FF had taken upon itself to pull down some files into my hard drive and update itself.

I'll be checking those preferences a little more carefully.  I lost my spell checker the last time I updated FF.  Too many years on the bleeding edge to put up with a cheeky program that helps itself to my computer.  /rant

Best,

Ken