Helpful Website for Retrieving Mac Info
I discovered a terrific site recently while monitoring the 2010 MacBook Pro BSOD Lion upgrade apple discussion. I’ve been waiting to upgrade my Macbook Pro because of so many people experiencing the BSOD. While browsing through the thread someone mentioned a terrific website that can retrieve the details of when your mac was manufactured and report all the specifications. You only need to provide your serial number.
In related news, you can also monitor the continuing BSOD saga on the facebook page that has been created.
Mac OS Lion Issues?
Have you upgraded to Mac OS 10.7 Lion? My father recently upgraded and immediately experienced hardware issues with his 2008 Macbook Pro (with NVIDIA graphics card). His particular model was known to have a graphic card defect and was a part of a recall that NVIDIA conducted. Fortunately, Apple replaced the motherboard and all is well now. This triggered some searches of my own, which led me to this Ars technica post and Apple Discussion thread. I am working with a 2010 Macbook Pro so I am holding off on the upgrade for now.
In preparation, I’ve downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner and successfully created a backup to an external USB drive. The CCC tool is very easy and intuitive to use. I highly recommend it. I also created a USB thumb drive installer for a clean install of Lion from a simple to follow Mashable post. I may pull the trigger on the upgrade soon and hope for the best. I’ll let you know the results.
Great Lifehacker video via Revision3
Text expansion, Windows passwords, hacking padlocks, build a Hackintosh computer and more…
Helpful WordPress Sites
I’ve been doing a lot of work with WordPress lately and compiled a short list of very helpful resources.
- http://www.wprecipes.com/ – loaded with helpful tips and workarounds for wp developers looking to make those custom tweaks.
- http://wpplugins.com/ – think of this site as an app store for WordPress plugins.
- http://wpsnipp.com/index.php – wordpress code snippets
- http://butlerblog.com/wp-members/ – nice plugin for creating a WordPress site with “members”.
- http://bbpress.org/ – add forum functionality to your WordPress site.
- http://codex.wordpress.org/ – let’s not forget the home base of all that is WordPress.
- http://www.pagelines.com/ – flexible and easy to work with themes.
- http://www.woothemes.com/ – very nice and professional themes.
- http://www.studiopress.com/ – great looking themes with excellent support.
There hundreds (if not thousands) of sites offering themes on the web. I mentioned the three above as I have personal experience with each of them so I am comfortable recommending them.
Protect your Facebook session with HTTPS
Source: Lifehacker
End of Year Time Machine Cleanup
During the Holiday break I decided to do a little computer file cleanup. I noticed that the size of my Time Machine backup had grown quite large (Approx 850 GB). That’s right, 850 GB. I decided I didn’t that many backups and proceeded to delete nearly all of the backup files save a few key ones. I then noticed that the .sparsebundle that is my backup was still reporting a file size of 850 GB. After doing a little google searching I found that this is common. I also found a way to manually compact the sparsebundle to reclaim some of that unused space. The trick was to use The Terminal.
Helpful Links:
- http://hintsforums.macworld.com/archive/index.php/t-84284.html
- http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-783907.html
Here is what I did since my backup has spaces in the filename.
- Launch Terminal
- cd /Volumes
- sudo -s
- ls (to view the Volumes)
- cd “Time Capsule Disk” (I had to include the quotes)
- hdiutil compact *.sparsebundle
If all goes according to plan, you should see the following messages:
Starting to compact…
Reclaiming free space
……………………………………
Finishing compaction…
Reclaimed xxx.x GB out of xxx.x GB possible
I reclaimed 507.5 GB!!! Your results may vary.
Protect your identity
Identity guard from Costco. The price is right. I was given this tip from my father and I am currently considering the service.
Get Your Quarterly Credit Updates and Public Record Profile. Call 1-866-818-0874 for more information.
The new Member Profile includes:
- New Message Board – Stay up-to-date with alerts, service updates and other important notifications.
- New Dashboard – All your information is available and easy to navigate with the new layout.
- Updated Financial Calculators – We’ve made our calculators easier to use to help you manage your finances.
- Current Credit Score – See at a glance your most recent credit score from all three credit bureaus.
“Award-winning IDENTITY GUARD TOTAL PROTECTIONSM, rated the #1 identity protection service” – PC World.
Copy changed files
This little tool isn’t for everyone, but someday you might have a need to compare files in two directories and only grab the changes. This is one of those tools that can be so handy in just the right situation. I’m thinking of using it for incremental backups as described on the examples page.
Superbar for windows system monitoring
Windows 7: If you like visual indicators for things like disk capacity, battery life, memory usage, and speaker volume, and you like them prominent and easy to find, SuperbarMonitor puts easy to read indicators right on your Superbar.
http://lifehacker.com/5488717/superbarmonitor-puts-system-monitoring-right-on-your-windows-superbar
Clean up your Mac’s “open with” contextual menu
I stumbled upon this short Lifehacker article about how to clean up duplicate apps listed in the “open with…” contextual menu. It caught my eye because I was just wondering how to clean this up on my Macbook Pro. I have installed Photoshop and then later upgraded so there are now two “photoshop” options listed. Looks like the solution is to rebuild your Mac’s LaunchServices database with the following terminal command.
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user