I finally sat down yesterday to erase and re-install OS X on my old 12” PowerBook G4. However, I was having problems getting the install disk to run so that I could erase the drive and install the OS. I kept getting errors like “this software cannot be installed”, and “this disk cannot be used as an install disk”.

Thinking that wiping the drive would fix it (doesn’t it always? ), I connected the old machine to my new machine via firewire, and booted the old one in target mode. Then I used Disk Utility to write zeros to the drive.

So then I had what amounted to an expensive firewire drive, since it still seemed that none of the install disks we have lying around the lab (including 10.2,10.3) were working. The Panther disk was giving me a circle with a slash through it, so I went looking for an explanation for that, and found a thread that suggested wiping the “PR Ram”, by holding down Apple/Command-P-R at boot. While this didn’t fix the circle-slash issue with the panther disk, I decided to give the 10.4 disk another shot, and voilà - it worked! The rest of the install process went smoothly.

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while - even so, I’ll try to be quick. I stumbled onto synergy a while back, and just got a chance to install it last week. Pretty sweet stuff - I’m using it to go back and forth between my powerbook and my desktop PC’s at home and in the office. (more…)

Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of different MySQL GUI apps, and this one seems as good as any I’ve seen (MySQL Front is also nice, but unfortunately is no longer free… phpMyAdmin is also handy, but is still a web app), and is open source (free as in free).

I still don’t use it all that much, preferring to run any necessary SQL from teh mysql prompt, but it’s handy to have around when you don’t want to take the time to look up that mysqldump syntax, or don’t have access to a prompt. Great tool if you are not as familiar with SQL.

Well, it’s free… but it also happens to be a neat tool for measuring things on your screen, such as windows, images, icons, etc. If you do any graphic design, it is worth checking out.

This handy System Preferences module “show system logs, unix commands output, or images (i.e. from the internet) on your desktop“. I’ve got it printing out my ip address(es), and giving me a date/time stamp (saving me real estate on my menu bar).

Finally, a real text editor for os x that doesn’t “suck“, and isn’t prohibitively expensive. Quite an active development team to boot, with lots of interaction from the user community.

Very cool. A friend just sent me a link to something that while being kind of hard to explain is at the same time going to be one of those apps that I constantly use. Quicksilver lets me hit a keystroke, then start typing the name of an app, file or whatever i might be looking for on the system, and it instantly brings up items while I type.

A friend of mine clued me in to MacJournal as a note-taking tool. Aside from being nice and simple, it keeps all your notes in one place, and opens up with the last set of notes you were looking at. It exports in various formats (not in XML, unfortunately), and allows for fairly rigorous organization.

What is perhaps it’s coolest feature is the “Taco” button, which you can click to get a pop-up with a simpsons quote. It’s like your own little morphine drip - you’ll never want to stop!

I’ve been using this “virtual desktop manager” on my PowerBook for some time. Since it’s a 12″, and thus the resolution only goes up to 1024×768, real estate is pretty precious. This basically allows me to multiply my desktop several times over, allowing me to have one “desktop” with my mail, IM, and browser open, another with terminals and editors open, another with Flash and bbedit open, and so on.