Archive for the 'lifehacks' Category

Shout out to drobo…

Published
by
patrick
on May 2, 2007
in lifehacks, mac, music and video
. 0 Comments

drobo.comI have been looking for a good storage solution for some time now. My addiction to music and the need to have reliable backups has left my current storage devices with meager resources. Then I read about DROBO. You have to watch the video, it is truly amazing what this device can do. I received my drobo last week and was already in love with it and the company when I received this email today:

Due to the incredibly high level of interest and sales from people like yourselves (did we say “Thank You!” yet?), we are significantly increasing Drobo production volume. This will allow us to realize production cost savings much earlier than anticipated. We feel the best thing to do is pass those savings on to our customers who made this possible. Therefore, effective immediately, Drobo storage robots offered through the friends & family pre-launch program will be at $499.00. Anyone who purchased a Drobo storage robot at a price above $499 will be rebated a check for the difference (including pro-rata sales tax if applicable). We want to thank this enthusiastic community who have embraced Drobo and made this possible. – Data Robotics, Inc.

How can you beat that!

[tags]Drobo[/tags]

HT: TUAW

The George Foreman grill you gotta have…

Published
by
patrick
on April 25, 2007
in commentary, ipod, lifehacks, mac and music
. 0 Comments

iGrillThis is a call to all self respecting backyard grillers out there who just have to have access to their tunes while standing over a hot grill. How can you resist the George Foreman iGrill? Yes, even George is jumping off into the wide mania of iProducts. You gotta get you one!

[tags]Grill, George Foreman, iProducts, iPod[/tags]

The year of the virtual machine…

Published
by
patrick
on January 1, 2007
in Internet, commentary, ideas, lifehacks and mac
. 0 Comments

I have for some time been fascinated by virtual machines. I have been reading a great deal about the possibilities that are available for sand-boxing, testing, and otherwise by the use of virtual machines. But this past week was my first true adventure into this new world, and I have to say that I am pretty pleased at this point.
Fusion VmWare just announced its full Beta release of Fusion which is their virtual appliance for OSX. Now being a mac guy I could have used Parallels but I was specifically waiting for VmWare to release their version, simply due to the trust that I have in their name and other appliances.
I began by installing VmWare Fusion which could not have been more simple. I have been using Bootcamp for several months now for those rare circumstances when I just had to have Windows. But, it was always such a pain to reboot the machine for that five minutes that I really needed to do something. And was even more painful if I had to be there longer since I no longer had access to all my music. Thus the beauty of Fusion which allows you to run the virtual machine within the same session that you are in currently, in my case OSX.
The first OS that I tried installing was Windows. I must say that it came off without a hitch. Windows installed beautifully and worked right out of the gate. I limited the drive to 8gb and gave the VM 1 gig of my 2 gigs of RAM. It is a little pokey but I must say it is not all that bad to use. I discovered early on that it is important to install VMTools on the new virtual machine as it allows you to change the window size on the fly and allows the mouse to move in and out of the virtual machine seamlessly. Having done all this my experience with installing Windows was almost pleasurable which is the first time I can say that about a product from Redmond.
I have also been wanting to take the opportunity to work in Ubuntu. I am not a Linux guy by any stretch of the imagination but I have the desire to learn more. I have read great things about Ubuntu and wanted to give it a try. I just did not have the spare machine to dedicate to my experiment. Ubuntu was only slightly Ubuntumore challenging than Windows. I began by trying to download a pre-installed version from the VMTN website. This is a great resource of already installed virtual machines that are pre-configured and ready to go. I could not find a good one of the new version of Ubuntu and thus downloaded the 6.06 version. I moved the new virtual machine into the vmware folder on my machine, double clicked, and away we went. It was truly amazing. VMTools was already installed on this machine and so all the cool window resizing and mouse tricks worked out of the box. The only thing that did not work was my sound which I imagine was a driver issue with my iMac and could have been fixed but I did not take the time to do so since I was feeling cocky and ready to get the latest version 6.10.
I downloaded an iso of the latest version of Ubuntu and began the full installation process. The process was very speedy with only a few hitches. It took a few minutes to get VMTools working on the machine. I had to do the update process several times and was aided in that by this article. The only inssue that I had beyond that was getting the mouse to work properly. It turned out that the mouse driver that Ubuntu was using was the default and not the vmmouse that is requried. I found this article quickly on VMTN and was again “good to go.”
I have to say that the entire experience has been very positive. I am looking forward to working in x11 on Ubuntu and not having to reboot for those times that I need Windows. Fedora is next so I will post about my experience with it. All in all a great experience.

[tags]VmWare, VmWare Fusion, Fusion, Mac, OSX, Parallels[/tags]

Productivity taken too far?

Published
by
patrick
on September 17, 2006
in commentary, lifehacks and productivity
. 0 Comments

Recently I have become a student of the GTD phenomenon, going so far as to take a daily glimpse at what 43folders has to say. There is no way to implement every idea suggested in the GTD sphere; were one to try they would spend all your time on GTD and never actually get anything done. In the spirit of realizing this rule, I came across this video cast which takes a moment to laugh at all those seconds that we save by doing things more efficiently.

[tags]productivity, GTD[/tags]

Tagging in iPhoto

Published
by
patrick
on September 12, 2006
in apple, lifehacks, mac, pictures and productivity
. 0 Comments

I had a friend inquiring the other night how to organize his iPhoto pictures. He is a little more OCD than myself in that he wanted to be able put all of his pictures into folders according to who was in them. I explained to him that iPhoto was not folder driven, rather it was driven more by a databse. I showed him how keywords could be added to photos, however he was not quite satisfied as the keyword feature in iPhoto is cumbersome at best.

Well, today I found this. This script has been around for sometime however it just went universal. This freeware plugin brings tagging to iPhoto making finding those pictures a breeze once you have added tags to it.

[tags]iPhoto, mac, apple, osx, photography[/tags]

Lose your cell phone? Ask it to scream for you

Published
by
patrick
on September 7, 2006
in cellular, ideas, interesting, lifehacks, mobile and phone
. 0 Comments

This article details a piece of software that will cause your cell phone to begin screaming if stolen from you. Most people realize that their cell phone is missing within in 30 seconds much faster than the one hour it takes us to realize our wallet is missing. I am not sure what that says but it says something. This software will cause the stolen phone to make a loud high pitched noise begging the thief to relinquish it.

[tags]mobile phone, cellular, security, mobile, phone[/tags]