Replace Microsoft’s Expired Remote Desktop for Mac with CoRD

I manage somewhere around a dozen servers running Windows 2003 Server, so I use the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection feature constantly. However, I don’t use their Mac client — it’s buggy, it’s slow, and it’s limited. And as of yesterday, it’s expired.

Of course, there IS no newer copy available from Microsoft. The RDC does still sort of work, it just turns off even more features. But hey, that’s the good news — because if you’ve been suffering along with Microsoft’s RDC client on a Mac, you now have a perfect excuse to replace it with CoRD.
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Evernote – a go-anywhere synchronizing note app

I’ve gone through a bunch of note management applications over the past few years. I always like the idea, but most of them require that you adapt yourself to their workflow in order to get the most out of them, or are difficult to access from multiple devices, which usually results in them being more trouble than they’re worth to me.

For the last week, however, I’ve been playing with Evernote, and the more I use it, the more I’m inclined to use it as my go-to organization app.
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Installing Java 6 on Mac OS X

As I mentioned previously, installing Woopra on a Mac requires installing the beta of Java 6. Unfortunately, how to get that done may not be terribly obvious to some users (it wasn’t to me, to begin with).
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Mail.appetizer for Leopard

Woohoo! Mail.appetizer is back!.

Mail.appetizer is a great little freeware “notifier” for mail.app — the mail program that comes with Apples OS X.

What it does is pop up a little translucent window on your screen with the sender, subject and an excerpt of the message each time you receive mail. It also has buttons to mark the message as read, delete it, or go to mail to view it.
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iMac Display Calibration

After living on Powerbooks and Macbook Pros for the past four years or so, I’m in the process of making the switch to a 24″ iMac instead. So far, all has gone well, except for a steadily increasing loathing of the display.

Everyone’s taste is different and everyone’s room lighting is different, but for me, the iMac display was way, way way too bright. Even cranking the “brightness” down all of the way, I was still seeing issues like white text on dark backgrounds “blooming”.

Fortunately, the fix turns out to be pretty easy.
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Whatever happened to Windows, anyway?

Wow. I just looked at Amazon’s top selling notebooks, and you have to get to number 6 before you find a Windows machine among them — and it’s the only one in the top 10.

1. Asus EEE 4G (Linux)
2. Macbook 2.4GHz White (OS X)
3. Asus EEE 4G Surf (Linux)
4. Macbook 2.0GHz White (OS X)
5. Macbook Pro 2.2GHz 15″ (OS X)
6. HP Pavilion (Windows Vista)
7. Macbook Pro 2.4GHz 15″ (OS X)
8. Macbook 2.4GHz Black (OS X)
9. Nokia 810 (Linux)
10. Asus EEE 8G (Linux)

You have to get to number 14 before you even find a second Windows machine.

Wow.

I’m just sayin’

Random Nonsense

Mac users are teh snobs.
(for good reason, damn it)

According to this week’s “Official Lost Podcast”, this explains how a Dharma Polar Bear could end up in Tunisia.
(Sure it does… Wormholes? Time travel? What’s next, leprechauns?)

Music from the System Folder…

(Somebody’s got waaay too much time on their hands)

Leopards Ate My Baby!

Well, not so much leopards as OS X Leopard.

And by my baby, I mean my MacBook Pro.

And by ate, I mean trashed my hard drive.

But other than that, yeah – Leopards ate my baby!

I did the preorder from the Apple Store, and the Fed Ex guy dutifully brought it by at about 8:40 this morning. Apple had marked it “signature required”, so I got a chance to ask the guy whether he had seen a lot of them; he told me that he had at least 300 on his truck alone, and wondered what it was, so I ‘splained.

The early arrival gave me a couple of hours to play with it before I had to run off to a meeting, so I threw caution to the wind and decided to give it a whirl.

My initial plan was to do a clean install of Leopard on an external drive, boot off of it, and slowly move essential apps over. This would give me a chance to do some housecleaning, and get away from an install that I’ve been carting around since Panther.

Unfortunately, Leopard was having no part of this — it would only install on the internal drive; not sure why this is the case.

When I said I was throwing caution to the wind, that’s a pretty mild breeze – I have two backups that are done automatically overnight, including a bootable clone, so I wasn’t overly worried.

That being the case, I decided to go ahead and upgrade the install on my internal drive.

After starting the install, it went through an interminable “consistency check” of the DVD. I let this run about 20 minutes and hit the skip button, and started installing.

The installer ran for about five minutes, and failed claiming that it had a problem copying one file, and that I needed to reboot and try again.

Attempting to reboot back to the internal drive failed spectacularly — it would attempt to start up, and then shut back down again.

Booting the Leopard DVD again, I attempted another install, and it indicated that there was a problem with the internal drive, so I started up Disk Utility off the Leopard disk, and tried a verify. That failed, so I tried a repair. That failed, so I dropped the partition and created a new one, and went back to trying to install. It failed again, in the same place.

Switching my startup disk to my clone backup, I booted off the backup, and tried Disk Utility from Tiger. It was also unable to verify or repair the internal drive, so I erased it, and it looked okay.

At this point I figured that the Leopard DVD was actually corrupted, so I tried it again, and this time let it complete the entire (45 minute) consistency check of the DVD.

No problem. So I decided to try the install again, and it completed about an hour and twenty minutes later, with no problem. I let it transfer my stuff from the backup drive (another 2 hours), and I’m now running Leopard.

I have no idea at all what happened; my best guess is that there was a formatting error on the internal drive, but if so, this does not seem to be a terribly robust way of handling it. After spending 45 minutes verifying the DVD, it might have been nice to verify the target drive too before trashing it in this manner.

The moral of the story is that BEFORE you do something like installing Leopard, be absolutely sure that you have a good, current backup. This isn’t the first time it’s saved my ass, and every time I become more of a believer. “Time Machine” is doing its backup at the moment, but I’ll still be doing a clone backup overnight, just on general principles.

This Post Brought to You by MarsEdit…

A quick tip of the hat to Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, who just cut loose version 2.0 of MarsEdit today.

The best blog posting software has gotten even better, with an improved user interface, Flickr integration, and a whole lot more stuff — while still keeping the zen-like simplicity that got me hooked in the first place.

Cheap at $30, even cheaper as a $10 upgrade if you have version 1. If you’re a blogger on OS X, you need to go get a copy.

(If you’re a blogger on Windows, you need to go get a Mac, THEN go get a copy)

Nokia N95 First Impressions

Yesterday the FedEx guy showed up with my new Nokia N95, fresh off the plane from Hong Kong. The idea of a well-connected, web-enabled feature-rich phone that also had a decent camera was just too tempting.

I like the idea of shooting pictures and videos, but I seldom leave the house with the intention of doing so; even though I’ve got a nice small digital camera, I hate dragging it around with me on principles, and even when I do want to use it, it’s seldom charged up.

The N95 is a better camera than my little pocket digital, and since I keep my cellphone charged and with me 24×7, I won’t have any excuses not to take a few pictures.

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