Fix Firefox Font Rendering Problem in Snow Leopard

Upgrading my iMac to Snow Leopard, one of the oddities I ran across was that in Firefox 3.52, a number of pages had their normal fonts replaced with “Courier” in odd places. Opening Font Book, I noticed that a number of fonts commonly used on web pages (Ariel, Verdana, etc.) showed that “duplicates” were present.

I right clicked on each of these, selected “Resolve Duplicates” and restarted Firefox, after which everything was back to normal.

No idea what the cause of this was, just thought I’d toss this out in case anyone else runs into it…

NeatReceipts for Mac (NeatWorks) Review

I’m terrible about handling paper – bills, receipts, invoices, you name it. I don’t do it well, and I seldom do it willingly. As a result, I’m usually desperately unorganized.

Last year, in an attempt to throw some technology at the problem, I picked up a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M. It’s a nifty auto-feed double sided scanner with a decent package of included applications. It helped tremendously, scanning in papers, OCRing them, and converting them to searchable .pdf files. It worked, but the task was still just sheer drudgery.

Enter NeatReceipts. I’d read several reviews, and it sounded nifty, but it comes packaged with a scanner, and I already had a scanner. However, they’ve recently introduced a “software only” version (NeatWorks) for people who already have a scanner like the Fujitsu. I had my doubts, but I ordered a copy.

This thing rocks!
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AudialHub – Universal Audio Converter for Mac

If you ever work with live concert recordings, or various “audiophile” audio, you’ve probably run across the lossless audio format “FLAC”. Apple of course has their own lossless format, “Apple Lossless”, but I’ve been frustrated that there’s been no good way to get from one to the other on OS X. The various applications I’ve tried have been unstable, or demos of a much more expensive package.

Fortunately, now there’s AudialHub — made by Techspansion, the same people who make the awesome VisualHub — the swiss army knife of video format conversion for the Mac.

AudialHub will convert from or to FLAC, Apple Lossless, WMA (Windows Media Audio), 3G (Cellphone Audio), AAC, Ogg Vorbis or MP3 — pretty much everything I’ve ever needed to deal with. It can also burn audio or MP3 CDs.
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Making Cmd-K = Search in Safari

Maybe I’m one of the few die-hard Firefox users on OS X (it doesn’t seem likely), but whenever I use Safari, it always drives me nuts that Cmd-K doesn’t go to Search.

Fortunately, it’s easy to fix.

Go to System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse, Keyboard Shortcuts, and press the little “+” sign in the lower left to add a new shortcut. Select Safari.app as the Application, enter “Google Search…” as the Menu Title, and press Cmd-K in the Keyboard Shortcut field.

Click “add” and you’re all done.

(From 5ThirtyOne via Lifehacker)

Eye-Fi Wireless SD Photo Memory Card – Review

I’m not much of a photographer.

It’s not that I don’t occasionally find things I want to take a picture of, it’s just that I seldom think about it far enough in advance to be sure I’ve got everything rounded up, the battery in my camera charged, etc. to be ready when the opportunity strikes.

Similarly, after I take some pictures, it’s a hassle to gather up the data cables, memory card readers or whatever other gear is required to get them onto my computer so I can deal with them. (Yeah, I’m the guy that used to go in to have a roll of film developed with photos from 12 events over 3 years on it).

That’s where the Eye-Fi card is brilliant. It won’t automatically charge my camera for me, but it does make dealing with pictures once I take them dirt simple.
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What Time Machine leaves behind

I mentioned earlier that while I like Time Machine a lot, depending on it as your sole backup is rather fraught with peril.

This post on macosxhints gives another good reason — apparently some applications (including notably, VMWare) silently exclude data files from Time Machine.
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How to back up your Mac – Remote Backup

Remote Backup

If you’ve followed along this far, you know we mentioned previously why you need several styles of backup, you’re rocking a solid clone backup, and you’ve got Time Machine covering multiple versions of at least your most important files.

That should be enough, right?

Bzzzt!

What could possibly happen to your Mac that could also affect the backups sitting next to it (or even in the same office or home)? Wait — let’s not cite potential specifics and jinx anybody; surely you’ve thought of some ugly possibilities.

That’s why we need the remote backup.
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How to back up your Mac – Time Machine

Time Machine

As I mentioned previously, Time Machine isn’t enough — you need a good clone backup first. But once you have that, Time Machine provides a safety net, as well as giving you the ability to go back and recover older versions of your files.
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How to back up your Mac – Clone Backup

Clone Backups

As I mentioned previously, a good clone backup is your FIRST line of defense — in case of disaster, it’s simple and flexible, and gets you back in business FAST.
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How to backup your Mac – Easily and Securely

I used to be a “real men don’t back up, they learn data recovery” kind of guy. After a few trips through the canyon though, data recovery begins to lose it’s appeal.

Over time I’ve gotten a lot more religious about backups, and have came up with four rules that have to be followed before I feel like my stuff is actually secure:

• Backups have to be automatic
• Recovery needs to be simple
• Some stuff needs to be recoverable from older backups
• Important stuff needs to be backed up off-site

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