Automator

I wrote my backup script in Automator last night. It was an interesting experience. Automator uses drag & drop entities to form workflows which are basically a script of actions to follow. I believe many of them use AppleScript behind the scenes.
First step involved writing a unix shell script to actually make my backup. Simple [...]

iCalamus and bits

I had a need to create an insert for an invitation we were making, so I searched around and came up with iCalamus, apparently a high-powered publishing tool. (What we used to call DTP in the old days) I checked it out and it seemed to have all the features I needed and was a [...]

Not much new except Growl

No new discoveries for a while since I have been largely busy on other projects. I routinely use the Mac for RSS, email and browsing now and have had no problems. Synergy has totally behaved itself since I last messed with it.
I installed Growl, a notification tool, but haven’t really seen the benefit of it. [...]

.Mac & Synergy (again!)

With the Mac I received 90 days free subscription to .Mac, Apple’s online sharing network. Since I operate my own web site, the benefits of .Mac (file sharing, web site, photos, online storage, email account) are not worth me paying the very steep price of $99 a year. That’s a lot of money for what [...]

RSS & FTP

I chose Vienna as my RSS client. Since I can’t have it integrated with Mac mail, I basically had the choice of a standalone reader or Safari’s implementation. I chose Vienna, a very rich, 3-pane RSS reader that is a breeze to use.
I had to abandon cyberduck as my FTP client, because it wasn’t a [...]

More bits & pieces

Synergy is proving to be challenging. Often I find when I come back from both my machines hibernating, the connection has been lost. Often I can restore it by killing and restarting the synergy server on the Dell, but often not. Oh another word of advice. Use SynergyKM to set up the Mac side of [...]

Synergy

Synergy rocks!! I had to fight to get it to work however. This was a pain because I had to keep swapping the USB mouse and keyboard between the PC and the Mac.
Wait, let me backtrack. Synergy is a really neat software-based KM, sort of like a KVM but it only does Keyboard and Mouse, [...]

Windows Connect sorted!

After some research I figured out the problem.
I discovered the NetInfo manager on the Mac that allowed me to ping and traceroute machines easily. I could have used the Terminal too, but I discovered NIM first. I could ping my router but not the Windows Dell. Aha!
Going back to the Dell I searched around my [...]

Connecting to a Windows Machine

Since I am going to be using my Windows DELL as a file repository, (It does have 0.5Tb already and contains my photo and iTunes library.) I thought I’d get the two machines talking. This proved to be more difficult than it looks.
On the Mac, browsing Network did not show any Windows machines on my [...]

Trying some Apps

Tonight I messed around with some of the apps on the desktop. I configured Safari and Mail, and am in fact composing this post in Safari.
I wanted to set up iTunes to read my iTunes library from my Windows machine, but couldn’t figure out how to make the Mac see the shared drive on the [...]