Tips

I have three OWC miniStack V2 external hard drives hooked up to my first generation Mac Mini. Two 500 GB are RAIDed together for 1GB of storage, and the other drive (750 GB) is the user accounts home directory folder. I have them daisy-chained together, and trust me, the back of the system is a cable jungle (see above image).

I am reasonably happy with the performance results. My review of the OWC miniStacks will have to wait for another day: in short, they're not perfect, but I did buy three so they can't be that bad. The RAIDed FW drives act as my Time Machine backup, and the 750GB drive fills up quickly with saved video, audio, and graphic projects.

This brief tip may be a obvious to many out there, but it took me far too long to figure it out, so I'll share on the off-chance it's useful to anyone else.

The NewerTechnology miniStacks have three additional USB ports on them, and therefore, should have been able to act as USB hubs for my extensive peripheral collection (EyeTV Hybrid, Fujitsu scanner, Canon digital camera, iPod dock, etc.). However, I could never get them to work as a hub. I believed this was because I was using them in FireWire mode and it was an either/or situation.

In the interests of science, it suddenly dawned on me - inspired by frustration - to just connect a USB cable ("Type A", the slim rectangular end to "Type B", the squarish connection type (usually on printers)) from the mini to the FW drive. Lo and behold, the USB ports on the external drive became active.

So, go figure, to make your USB ports active, you have to connect them to the USB port on the computer. The neat part is that you can have the USB ports active, but the drive still functions in FireWire mode with the FireWire cables connected, at FireWire speeds. Very cool - and for everyone but me it seems - very obvious.

D'oh.

As a related aside, I've used an eSATA drive and discovered how wonderfully fast they are. My experience is that your real-world speeds, in order of slowest to fastest are: USB, FW 400, FW 800, and eSATA. I have been considering how I could move to eSATA on my external drives, and then came across this CNET News article about the next iteration of FireWIre called "S3200" which should quadruple the speed of FireWIre next year. The neat thing about it is that while it may not be as fast as the up-coming USB 3, FW S3200 promises to be backwards compatible, and still provide bus power. So, for educators considering outfitting they're lab with the future in mind, FireWire may still be the horse to back.

This is useful to, oh, probably one Mac-enabled eduactor. And that would be me.

On the off-chance it may be useful to anyone else, if you happen to use Ecto, a blogging client for OS X, and a Drupal (a Content Management System (CMS)) for your blog website, you may find that line breaks do not function as expected. As in, the lines don't. "Break" that is.

The solution is to go under Administration -> Site configuration -> Input format, and click on "configure" for "Full HTML".

You will need to de-select "Line break converter".

OK, fine. A bit of an anticlimax.

Get back to the "Daily Show".

There are far too many things not to know in technology, providing excellent opportunities to embarrass yourself among Geeks.

An obvious example of this becomes a lesson in English usage: the difference between an abbreviation (Why, oh why does "abbreviation" have TWO "Bs"? That makes no sense.) and an initialism.

The omniscient Wikipedia provides a good explanation, but in short, you pronounce an abbreviation and you spell out the letters of an initialism. For example, you say:

"U", "R", "L" for URL (not "earl") (that's your Uniform Resource Locator), but you say
"ram" (as in goat) for RAM (Random Access Memory).

There are lots of examples of these acronym/initialism ambiguities in techno-jargon, providing plenty of opportunities to embarrass yourself in front of your students. Try to get them right.

TTFN.

TastyApps made a great little plugin for Safari that allowed you to copy Flash movies from web sites. With the update to Safari 3, FLVR no longer worked and Iaunching Safari kept creating a "SIMBL error" ("SIMBLE Error Safari 3.0.4 (v5523.10) has not been tested with the plugin FLVR (null) (v1.0). As a precaution, it has not been loaded. Please contact the plugin developer for further information.")

Searching for "FLVR" does no good, as the plugin is actually called "SIMBL" which, for some reason, also would not appear in a Spotlight search. The solution is to manually navigate to:

/Library/InputManagers/

and delete the "SIMBL" folder.

TastyApps has replaced the FLVR plugin with a new application called Videobox:

Given the copious amount of information on our Macs these days, a popular and affordable solution can be to use a Mac Mini and and External FireWire drive as a poor man's Mac server. Now, like so many things, you get what you pay for: there are many limitations to this set-up. However, if all you're doing is keeping a central repository for your Documents, iTunes library, and iPhoto library.. this may be a solution.

If you have such a set-up, and you've upgraded to Leopard (10.5) you may discover that the old stand-by method of pointing to a home folder on an external drive by using NetInfo Manager has a bit of a problem: NetInfo Manager no longer exists. While this may seem like a step back, Apple has managed to make the process easier and more intuitive - but you have to get into the habit of right-clicking (control-clicking) everything to discover options. Home folders have something to do with accounts, so, try right-clicking your account (System Preferences -> Accounts), et voila, the only option available is "Advanced Options" and there you go: simply select the location of the home folder you desire, external or internal.

Be aware, however, that some bugs never change. If something messes up, usually as the result of a sudden unanticipated shut-down, otherwise known as a crash, and your Mac can no longer find the external home folder you may have to rename the external drive, and then point it to the newly re-named drive and the original folder therein.

It took far, far too long to figure this out. Actually, an embarrassingly long time, so please let's stop talking about it.

To mark the end of a song in GarageBand, drag the purple arrow in the top measure marker area to where you would like the end of your song to be. When exporting, GarageBand will automatically cut off dead air - in theory. However, if you want to keep your GarageBand window as manageable as possible, or end the song earlier that the last bit of recorded sound, the purple arrow is your secret weapon.