Yes, admittedly I’ve used my early 2008 macbook pro pretty hard, extending the capabilities of its processor speed and memory, sliding it around on the coffee table, dropping it on its corner, ripping and burning dvds, and, the greatest tragedy, leaving it out around my two kids.

In this story, we reflect on the life of the slot loading drive and its slow decline to death.
I started noticing the drive acting up a few months ago. Sad that I was, I just figured it was from all the dvd work that I was making it do. Then I installed Snow Leopard. Granted it spun and read the installer DVD for a good hour, but giving up the ghost was not what I figured the result would be.

I came across a mac forum where scores of people reportedly were having CD-ROM issues after installing Snow Leopard, but as is typical with most forums, people get on tangents, cursing each other out for misspellings or unclearly describing the issue at hand, thus in the 10-some pages of threads, no solution was reached.

I then turned to cleaning the inside of the drive. First there was compressed air. Then a credit card wrapped in cloth to swipe the inside of the drive- blindly of course- not recommended. Let me say that my drive was dead before this. I would slide a CD in, it would give a small grinding noise and pop right back out. The only solution: buy an external Cd drive (thats mac compatible) or replace the drive. I chose the latter- as it would have better results in the long run.

I found an exact match on ebay for only $85 down- a great deal compared to $130 + shipping elsewhere. Hesitant as anyone would be about dismantling an entire mac laptop (especially one that’s only 3 years old), I planned my evening accordingly, almost, and tackled it straight away using a super awesome repair guide provided for free, with pictures, from Fixit.com. I say “almost” because I took for granted that I had a super small T6 torx screw driver, and I realized this at 8pm. Luckily Lowes had a great set for only $7, buried as it was, I found it with minutes to spare before they closed.

Fixit.com: Repair Guides

The process went really well, just as the guide described. However, in the step you see pictured to the right I found the culprit to my dead slot drive. It wasn’t worn out from over use or so dirty that it couldn’t read discs… when I pried up on the back of the drive, a bobby pin fell out! Yes, a ladies bobby pin. My kids get a hold of these in the house and like to stick them in places they shouldn’t go. I just laughed. Needless to say, I swapped out the drive in all about an hour and a half. It was easier than I thought, by far. Now the drive works like new.

Is it strange that I like this stuff?

If you find yourself needing to replace your Mac drive, be sure to find the exact guide for you on Fixit.com and you can also take a look at this blog for an up close look at the drive itself.

Header image from http://www.atoasttothese.com

All you have to do, after installing it, is follow the directions in the screenshot below: Choose the key you want to remap (or replace), then choose what key will take its place, then click “remap key.” Restart your computer and you’re done. Note that this change will effect everyone on that computer…which can be a funny little April fools gag.

A good use for this, in this person’s instance, is that since she works with the keypad and excel alot, there’s no tab on that side of the keyboard to quickly move cells with the same hand. So she changed the asterisk key to be her new tab button. And she said it was easy. Who would have thought?

How to remap keys using KeyTweak

I’ve recently stumbled across Clonezilla as an effective way to not only backup the current state of your harddrive by way of imaging it, but, in my everyday use, an effective way to image and deploy other systems.

I recently setup my Time Capsule on my home network and started using Data backup 3 as a way to copy selected folders to my network drive, but lately I have been pondering about, essentially, taking a shot of the current state of my mac’s HDD, just in case something went terribly wrong. With Clonezilla, I can capture that current state onto my Time Capsule (or other media) and keep it for safe storage.

When you create an image of your disk, you’re creating an exact clone of its current state. This might be more useful in the Windows world. Generally it takes me a good 2-3 hours to reformat a Windows PC, install all the drivers and software I want. Such a time consuming task would be minimized later with Clonezilla when I get a virus or junk up the registry from all my testing. Just deploy and I’m back to where I want to be. This really is an easy backup system. Anyone can follow it, and better yet, it works on Windows, Linux and Mac.

So here’s the rundown:

Download the .iso of Clonezilla live and burn it to a CD.
Open this procedure and follow the steps I’ve outlined (with Screen shots)

If you want more information, like how to prepare a PC for first-use deployment using Sysyprep…
see http://techtalkplus.blogspot.com/2008/08/using-sysprep-clonezilla.html (my favorite)
or http://blog.brianleejackson.com/sysprep-a-windows-7-machine-%E2%80%93-start-to-finish-v2
or, if you’re not totally brain dead, How Sysprep Works.

The iPad: 10″, 1.5 lbs, multitouch of course, bluetooth, wifi, speaker, mic, accelerometer, 10-hours of battery life, and runs all iphone apps.
Availability:  2 Months! Just enough time for me to save up some cash.

Steve Jobs Shows Off iPad today at Apple Event

Although Jobs claims that you can easily type on it, he also introduced the iPad dock.

iPad dock

And just when you thought the “iBook” was dead, Apple brings an application for the iPad called “iBooks” for reading ebooks. Just check out this picture.

iPad iBooks

For more information, check out Macworld’s live coverage or Appleinsider. But really, even if you don’t want to hear about the iPad, you will. Trust me.

From Around the Web: Collection of Useful Tidbits

1. Resizing your Mac Partition
Leopard and Snow Leopard actually make it really easy to create a partition (free space on which to install an Operating System). In Windows, this is impossible without shelling out $$ for some software. Ya, it’s built in for the Mac. But if you need to install Windows, just use Boot Camp- which not surprisingly, is always really easy. To repartition your drive, ready more by clicking on the title.

Disk Utility

2. What you might not know about Mac’s new OS, Snow Leopard
Snow Leopard has been out for some time. I just upgraded to it a few weeks ago and I love it. Mac released an update to Leopard, and called it Snow Leopard, because it’s not a whole new cat, just an upgraded one. The heading above is a link to an article on 23 things about Snow Leopard. My favorite features include 512px icons inside Finder, “scrubbing” through .pdfs and keynotes right inside the icon, writing on .pdfs within Preview, and more information for available networks in the menu., oh yeah, and the speed. My least favorite newbie: Quicktime X’s icon-yuck.

Snow Leopard

3. Cross browser testing for your websites
If you ever create any sort of website, you’ll come to a point when you start to wonder if all the work you’re putting in will look the same across the globe of varying browsers and operating systems. For that there’s Adobe BrowserLab.

Adobe BrowserLab

4. Don’t steal my stuff!
When I created YouandMePhotography.net it was requested that I keep people from right clicking on the images in order to save them. So it took me about 2 seconds to find this code needed to disable right clicking.

Dont right click

5. All Those Lovely Web Colors
My fifth favorite web finding is ColorCombos.com’s Web Colors. They have lots to offer, but the one feature I continually go back to is their “what the heck is this color” feature (something I just named). When I’m looking at website code and see “color:#333987″, this site tells me that it’s shade of purple. Simple and effective. Useful. Bookmarked.

WebColors

These five are my current favorite web findings. More to come I’m sure. If you’ve found something useful, leave a comment here or, better yet, enter it in in the new Share a Tip? section.

(By the way, any recent Mac has built in screen sharing and it can actually be initiated within Safari, no doubt,  found in the path: /System » Library » CoreServices » Screen Sharing.app, or “Connect to Server…” from the Finder’s Go menu. All you need is the IP address of the machine you want to connect to and the port number. For a PC, you have to install a vnc server client first. I used RealVNC Server. I started the first connection using Safari because it let me drag the favicon to my desktop and give it nice little custom icon. In the address bar, type “vnc://ip.add.ress/port#”. More information on Screen Sharing can be found here and here. Let me also just mention, before I continue, that if you’re using Snow Leopard and you continually get just a white screen when you start the connection, navigate to /System » Library » CoreServices » Screen Sharing.app and press cmd+i and check the box for 32bit. That will solve it. Ok, enough side notes.)

While reading my daily dose of Lifehacker.com, I came across an article about a guy who put a touchscreen PC in the wall of his kitchen. While I like the concept in it’s complete entirety and must implement it someday, it stood out to me how he created a custom iphone-like desktop interface with which to interact. He just built a website, hosted it on his own computer, and used XP’s Active Desktop feature to display the webpage a background. After reading this, I thought to myself that it’s totally doable for my MediaBox. And it would be simple to do and simple looking. Maybe a few bigger icon links at the top for the more general viewing sites and a few specific icons for shows we (my wife) watch regularly.

So without further delay, here is the current draft of the website.

Basically it serves one purpose as an interface for the MediaBox- to get us to where we want to go. It sure beats a plain desktop with a few icons. There’s only one problem. I said I’m running Windows 7, a version of Windows where Active Desktop was taken out. Active Desktop never caught on in the many, many years it was included in previous versions of Windows. Honestly, I never had a use for it, until now. And now that it’s gone in current versions of Vista and 7, I think people are realizing how powerful it really was or could have been. So ya, I don’t really have a way to DISPLAY the webpage on my desktop, but I’m working on it. If you have a good solution, leave it in the comments.

I’m excited to try this out and will continue to work on the design. But it’s been really fun so far.

When I started using FF years ago, I loaded all sorts of themes and addons to it, trying to make it faster, sleeker, blacker, and safer. But not only did it slow it down (trying to load all the tweaks) it became reminiscent of a nice looking car plastered with bumper stickers. It was probably during the same era when it was “cool” to sow patches on your pants or glue them to your back pack. Nonetheless, I found it much more simple to run Firefox as is, or maybe with one or two add ons. To date, I run 1 addon and 1 theme. For the addon or extension, I use IETab which lets me run IE inside Firefox (’cause some websites at work don’t like any else but IE). For the theme I happened upon Stata40 thanks to this article by Lifehacker.

Strata40 gives Firefox that sweet look of today. On XP, it’s sleek and silver. This theme is said to reflect the rumored design of FF 4.0. If you want to make it look and behave more than the expected coming version, the developer advises to install a few apps found on the addon page. Make sure to check out at least the theme. I like it more and more every day.

Strata4.0 Firefox Theme

The goal for this box: create a media solution which will access online content and display it on the TV. Since we canceled our cable, we’ve been watching more online movies and shows with the help of hulu desktop, Boxee, and recently trying out XBMC media center and Netflix.

I started off by doubling the memory to 2Gs, then after some “slight” modifications to the frame, added a CD-RW/DVD drive. Then I installed Windows 7 on it and the corresponding media software. Of course I installed Apple’s Airport Utility in order to access my Time Capsule and set it for remote connections. The projected process will entail storing the box under my TV (behind closed doors-because its ugly, well when compared to an Apple computer), keeping it on and connected to my home network, then using CoRD for Mac, remoting in, selecting what I want to watch, then closing the connection and enjoy free viewing of the Office or a new release.

CoRD is a super easy to use remote desktop client for Mac. I used this tutorial for help in adjusting some Windows settings and starting the first connection. The process should be pretty seamless but last night in my sleep I realized that typical RDCs like Window’s own Remote Desktop Connection software (which is also available for Mac) usually close the connection when disconnecting. You can’t stream video when you’re not logged in to the computer, of course. I don’t want to have to keep my Mac open and on while watching a movie. I’ll have to do more testing, which I never mind doing, but if it doesn’t work the way I desire, the other solution is to get a VNC client.

A VNC client (Virtual Network Computing) is a remote connection client as well, but is typically slower. The benefit is that you can authenticate the connection but not have to sign into windows. Thus, the screen viewing window can be closed but Windows will not be logged out. I’ll have to install a VNC Server, like RealVNC Server, on the PC, and then use Chicken of the VNC to view the connection on my Macbook Pro. The only caveat currently is that I don’t have a way to connect it to my TV. And since my TV is a bit out dated, I’m doing to have to find a slick solution. I’m looking at either installing a new video card or forking over the cash for a pc to tv adapter. Both have sucky issues, but it’s still cheaper than buying a new tv, paying for cable every month, or buying a mediabox specifically made to do what I want to do. I’ll keep you posted.

I recently happened upon a great deal on a 1TB Apple Time Capsule thanks to Best Buy’s oversight on a $100 less than retail price tag for such a piece of hardware. Luckily I did my homework and knew that on a normal day (even on a holiday sale day) Best Buy would over charge shoppers for this particular Apple product. But I, with my keen eye, snagged it quickly into my cart at a low low price of $239, a price you can’t even find on ebay-used! Oh yeah, and the gift card I got from my wife made the deal all the more sweet.

So naturally, buying an external harddrive got me thinking of backing up my system (rightly so, to get it ready for Snow Leopard- this weekend?). I haven’t used Time Machine before but I knew I didn’t really want to backup my entire system. I’d like to use my HDD for more than just backups and Time Machine would just fill it up. So I did a bunch of new research into a selective backup utility, one where I could choose what folders I wanted to backup and when. But finding one wasn’t easy, let alone one that can communicate with a mounted network drive, such as a Time Capsule. Thankfully, it only took me a few tries to find Prosoft’s Data backup 3.

Data Backup 3 ($50) is really straight forward and does what you need it to do. DB3 gives you choices for the type of backup you want. I chose Versioned because it will not only update only the modified files per backup, it will also keep a number of versions of each file I change or delete. Click the plus sign to add the sources you want backed up. Choose the destination of the backup (for me I chose my Time Capsule under Shared in the Finder). Then schedule it. I chose Interval, every 10 days at 2am and in Preferences made sure to allow the program to wake the computer up to run the backup, which is probably my favorite part. Obviously, I can run intensive and possibly lengthy backups at night when the Mac’s not being used.

So far, this is the best backup solution I have found, one where I can control what is backed up, when and how. If you’re looking for a great backup utility, stop looking and try out Data Backup by Prosoft.

DB3 Scheduler

With Jolicloud you get the benefits of a fast, internet ready OS, but also a desktop, file system, preferences, and ability to install your favorite apps. The GUI was rather simple and easy to navigate. I browsed through the admin panel and system preferences and found what you’d expect in a typical computer system, plus some. Jolicloud has built in remote desktop capabilities-XP Home edition doesn’t even have that! I doesn’t come installed with any sort of office apps, but with free tools like Google Docs, you’re set regardless (or you could try OpenOffice).

Typical “desktop” icons are replaced with a small row of icons at the top left which tell you which applications/windows are open (see the screenshots). It comes loaded with a bunch of screensavers (very 90s type screensavers, but still). There are all sorts of preferences you can tweak, just like you’re use to, such as windows, colors, power management, shortcuts, sounds, and startup items. The list goes on. All in all, it was pretty nice. I think it’s going to compete really well in the netbook world. One thing, I did notice that a few minutes in, my keyboard stopped working. Eh, all well. It’s still beta. And it’s linux, so it’s virus free. So see the gallery of screenshots below for more details. And see the post at Lifehacker.com for more great screenshots and information.

[nggallery id=2]

READ MORE…

The easiest way to do this is to open your Pandora account in Safari, log in, and let it start playing. Go to the taskbar at the top of your screen, while Safari is active. You will see ‘Safari’ next to the Apple symbol. Click File>Open in Dashboard… It will give you the option to select an area. I personally selected the entire field that has options (Row 1 with radio stations and active song, Row 2 with ‘about this music’ etc), because this allows me to have full Pandora functionality from within Dashboard. Now click ‘add’ (purple button in Safari 4, blue button in Safari 3.2.1). Dashboard opens with the new widget active. Click the little ‘i’ symbol in the lower right corner of your new Pandora widget, and uncheck ‘Only play audio in Dashboard’. This will keep Pandora playing in the background, even when Dashboard is not active.

No more explanation is needed. You can do this to pretty much anything else on the internet. In the screenshot of dashboard below, you’ll notice in the bottom right corner a list of mac keyboard symbols that I saved a while ago from some random website. Pretty sweet.

Dashboard with Pandora Embedded

After reading and realizing the risk of breaking all my links and having search engines reject me if I did it wrong, I decided anyway to change the default structure from /?p=# to /%post_id%/%postname%/.  The default structure is pretty ugly and it does next to nothing for your blog. It doesn’t say anything useful about your post, so changing it to the above says that it’s whatever post number (ID) and the post name. I found that referencing a number (post_id) instead of text (postname) first, enhances overall performance (See structure tags).

But if you just change the structure in wordpress without advanced editing, you’ll get an error anytime a specific post is accessed. To correct this, I used the Permalinks Migration Plugin by Dean. Here are a few things to note:

1. Figure out what permalink structure you’re currently using (Settings>Permalinks)
(My structure wasn’t super obvious as WP only gives an example of the structure- not the exact format. If yours is set to Default under Common Settings, then its /?p=# )
2. Install and activate the plugin
3. Go to PermalinksMigration under Settings and paste in your old format. Click Update Options
4. Go to Permalinks under Settings and type in the new format (use /%post_id%/%postname%/ like me & Lifehacker.com or the other common format is /%category%/%postname%/ ) Click Save Changes
5.  You might get a message from wordpress saying something about a .htaccess file. You’ll want to do what it says. For me, I had to see if I even had that file on my server. I didn’t. So I created it using this article and an editor like Smultron (or use Notepad on Windows). I just copy & pasted the code WP gave me, saved it as .htaccess and uploaded it to the root of my ftp. I clicked Save Changes again and there ya go. I got pretty permalinks.

There’s one extra special thing that just tickles my silly really. While most of my Hulu watching is commercial suppressed, Hulu REALLY wants to make sure I watch what the advertisers have paid for me to watch. So when something goes “wrong” and the commercial cannot be played, I rejoice and Hulu politely asks me to contact support so they can help me get the commercials working again. Say what? Yes. You’ve probably seen this. They’ve gotta be nuts.

At work, I have all my desktop icons arranged exactly how I want them-”minimally” really, because I hate a cluttered desktop. But every now and then I am working away from my desk, thus need to remote into my computer to get something or to multitask, whatever. Since my desk PC has dual monitors (and icons on each) when I remote in, all the icons move into one screen. So when I’m back at my desk, my icons are all out of whack.

I found a little piece of software from a guy who hated rearranging his icons every time his monitor changed resolutions (same kinda thing). After installing Desktop Restore, three choices are added to the  contextual menu when you right click on the desktop: Save Desktop, Restore Desktop, or Custom Save/Restore. Pretty simple. Get your desktop icons how you want them, right click, Save Desktop, Kabam! Messed up icons on your desktop? No worries. Right click, Restore Desktop.

Three Choices Added to Right Click Menu

If you’ve found something just as simple that you’d like to share, go ahead and leave at least a link to it in the comments.

Lead image by Md.Monirul Islam (Monir)

This last month, Google released Chrome OS (operating system) to developers. Google plans on targeting netbooks with their OS because it’s fast and small-perfect for netbooks. Google’s aim is to get you booted up and on the internet as fast as possible, ready to use any of its web apps. And since Google has all sorts of web applications, it seems fitting that they would want to point you in that direction. They are embracing the internet trend (as stated more correctly, they usually SET internet trends) of “cloud computing” where everything is stored and done on the internet. Just look at Google Docs- a powerful suit of free “office-like” apps, all on the internet.

Well, as far as the Google OS goes, I wanted to give it a try. I happened upon martijndevisser.com who wrote an article about running Chrome OS as a virtual machine using Parallels for Mac. It was pretty straight forward and a few minutes later I was running Chrome, the operating system.

My reaction? Blah.

Yes, it boots up right into the internet, right into… well, Chrome. And…that’s it, minus the “fancy” log in screen. I wanted to see what was behind the browser, thinking that if I closed it or at least minimized it, I would see a twist on the Windows “Start” button or maybe a dock-like interface with more apps and settings. But…nope. There’s no “X” or close button on the browser. All I could try was to close every tab until it went away. The first time I tried it, it just went to blue blank screen. The second time I tried it, the browser closed and then restarted itself. So amazingly, there’s no desktop, no icons, no dock, no log off or shut down button. Simple and plain, I guess.

I’ll spare you from too much excitement and just show you the screen shots. They’re amazing:

So my advice? If you want to try out Google Chrome OS, just download Chrome, the browser. It really is a sweet browser, with or without it’s own operating system.

Be sure to see my post Windows 7 Beta on MacBook Pro for more information on running Parallels on a Mac.

UPDATE: Google Chrome has finally been released officially from Google, but it’s still in beta. As my friend Jason pointed out to me either, it’s still missing java, but “in due time I suppose.” More features to come.

1. Quit Mail
2. Open Terminal (cmd+space bar, type in “Terminal”)
3. Paste in this command: /usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3 vacuum

If you do it right, like I did the second time, Terminal will look like what’s highlighted in the picture below:

Open up Mail again and it will look for updates to RSS feeds. Again, simple and quick.

Sometimes the icons on your desktop will have color behind them, making it SO 1990. And its really not obvious how to change this so there’s NO color, or so that it’s transparent. These tips are all over the internet, but I’ve collected two main fixes here.

First: Go to this path: Control Panel> System> Advanced Tab> Settings button under Performance> and make sure “Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop” is CHECKED.

Second: Right click on some blank space on the desktop, mouse over “Arrange Icons by” and UNCHECK “Lock web items on the desktop.”

Simple and effective tutorial, but hey when you’re staring at an ugly desktop, a fix like this is a life saver from going crazy.
_________________________

If you have a trick of your own or a tip you’ve  found useful, we would love to hear it.

To Delete A Service

• Start | Run and type cmd in the Open: line. Click OK.
• Type: sc delete <service name>
• Reboot the system

command prompt

And of course, it works perfectly. I love it when things are simple.

iMac:
Apple today unveiled an all new iMac line featuring brilliant LED-backlit 21.5 and 27-inch widescreen displays in a new edge-to-edge glass design and seamless all aluminum enclosure. The new iMac line, starting at $1,199, is the fastest ever with Intel Core 2 Duo processors starting at 3.06 GHz, and Core i5 and i7 quad-core processors for up to twice the performance. Every new iMac ships with a wireless keyboard and the all new wireless Magic Mouse, the world’s first mouse with Multi-Touch technology.

Macbook:
Apple today updated its popular MacBook with a new, durable polycarbonate unibody design featuring a brilliant LED-backlit display, a glass Multi-Touch trackpad and Apple’s innovative built-in battery for up to seven hours of battery life. Inheriting technology and design features from the MacBook Pro line, the new MacBook is an ideal consumer notebook for students and new Mac users, and is available for $999.

MagicMouse:
Today Apple introduced the new wireless Magic Mouse, the first mouse to use Apple’s revolutionary Multi-Touch technology. Pioneered on iPhone, iPod touch and Mac notebook trackpads, Multi-Touch allows customers to navigate using intuitive finger gestures. Instead of mechanical buttons, scroll wheels or scroll balls, the entire top of the Magic Mouse is a seamless Multi-Touch surface. Magic Mouse comes standard with the new iMac and will be available as a Mac accessory at just $69.

After hours of Google searching, I found all sorts of ways to do this. You can call jQuery OR use the advanced, not yet implemented techniques of CSS3 and place parts of the image at different corners of the page (Safari is the only browser that can use CSS3 currently). I tried the CSS3 procedure, which was basically separating different image urls by a comma @ the body tag and defining their location. This is where I learned that designing a website in Safari is really not the best choice since it’s that must more advanced than what everyone else is using. So more searching brought me to a little German website (http://www.younic.de/) where I found THE trick, and, amazingly, it was about the only article on the site that’s in English.

Scaling body background images with pure CSS describes a SUPER easy way to add any image to your website’s background by placing this code after the <body> tag (without the first and last quotation marks):

"<style type="text/css">
#background
{
width:100%; height:100%; position: absolute; z-index: -1; top: 0; left:0;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<img id="background" src="yourbackgroundimage.jpg"/>"

In Wordpress, your <body> tag is in the header file.

One thing I noticed about this code is that you might have to change “position: absolute” to position:fixed” if your website/background doesn’t operate correctly. Note that your image may be stretched to fit the widescreen displays if its not made for WS already. Check out where I’m currently using this.

Pandora sets a 40 hour listening cap on its free “subscription” and resets the number of listening hours at the top of every month, but I always hit that cap with like 2 or 3 days to go AND the last day of the month for me is always the longest, even longer without good music. So I need Pandora more. And until today, did not think it was possible.

Thanks to the wisdom of those at OSX Daily they have provided us with a way to “delete” this limit on a Mac, yes, but also on Windows (thanks for not leaving PC users out in the cold). Not having written about many Windows tips lately, I will post here how to do this on Windows.

First, log into your account (even though you can’t listen to music, you can still get to your account/profile). So for example, as of this writing, there are 4 boxes at the bottom. Click the one of the right “Your Bookmarked Songs.” Then click on “Share > Tell a Friend” at the top and send an email to another one of your email addresses. This way you can listen to the same station(s) you usually do.Then, as OSXDaily.com writes, on PC,

* Navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects
Replace “USERNAME” with your user name
* Same as above, there will be a bunch of random folder names, you can delete them all, or just the ones containing ‘pandora’ in the name
* Now navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys
* Find the folder named ‘#pandora.com’ and delete it, or just delete all the files
* Finally, navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Cookies and delete everything labeled ‘pandora’

I haven’t been able to confirm if deleting these files actually deletes my saved radio stations (can’t imagine it would), but to be careful, I just moved the folders/files.

Then go to http://pandora.com/#/stations/create/ and sign up for a new account, using a different email address than at first. Once signed up, go to your email where you shared with yourself your radio  station and click the link. Then click on Listen. You can even bookmark your first “self” so you can access all of your other stations. Rating songs doesn’t work exactly, unless you break the link and make the station your own. Keep the station shared to keep it in its original state.

So now, you have another 40 hours of pure goodness. If you use this, let me know. And better yet, place the link to your favorite station in the comments.

UPDATE:  Oct 1st-listening limit reset: Signing back into your first account is doable AND all the stations are there. Also, I just found OpenPandora which lets you listen to your stations from a free windows desktop client (the alternative to is to pay $$ for pandora one). It looks just like the real thing. Try it out.

UPDATE: To make this process easier, I have created a batch file for Windows XP (may work on Vista or Windows 7). Running this file will automatically delete the files in the above directories. Download the file HERE. Unzip this file and it contains a .txt file which will open in Notepad. Where is says “USERNAME” replace with the name of your account found in that directory (for me on my windows PC, that[’s “coryc”).  Make sure the file paths as given above are correct for your computer. Then go to File>Save As, add “.bat” to the end of “DeletePandora” in the “File Name” field, change the “Save as type” field to “All files” and save it.
When you’re ready to run the program, just double click it. Presto. Let me know how it works for you. Oh yeah, after running the batch, don’t forget to delete your cookies in whatever browser you’re using.

FatCow

In every issue I see Fatcow.com web hosting at an incredible price and offering virtually unlimited file storage and bandwidth. So when it came time for me to create tech4eleven, I knew where I wanted to go for hosting. I think I paid something like $60 for the year. Pretty nice. So I made the decision based on MacLife and Macworld’s reputation for promoting good services, thinking “why would they have something in their mags if they didn’t endorse it?” fore-going the fact that, well, its an ad & this money in their pocket, so who cares about the company right? I also made the decision KNOWING about bluehost (and others) which perhaps have more endorsers. Nonetheless, I was blazing my own trail, seeking something new and “exciting.” (sounds harsh, poor fatcow, but listen in)

Right off the bat, I have some very frustrating issues with Fatcow. The wordpress installation was easy, but I kept getting server error codes, keeping me out of my website and out of the wordpress admin area. At times, I would make a simple change a theme file and it would give me those errors during the save. They were very random and very upsetting. What’s good is that their have an available 24 hr chat (maybe cause they need it), but if you say you have a technical issue and select to chat with someone in support, you don’t. You always get some joe shmoe who ends up submitting the issue to a techy. I think I submitted like 5 tickets with them in the first few weeks, all of which always got a “solution” saying “issue was fixed on our end. please check your end to confirm” then the ticket was closed. But it was never fixed on my end. So the back and forth went. Somewhere down the line, the issues resolved themselves (so it seemed) and it’s been fine since.

Bluehost

Bluehost is also on the top of many “Best Of” web hosting collections and it’s one of the top Wordpress.org recommended hosting sites. So I knew that going in. Plus one of my good friends uses it for all of his sites, and he recommended it. But again, I was saving the world by going my own way. So with the immediate issues I had with fatcow, I went a head and used Bluehost for a photography website I am building for my sister in law. Fatcow was the cheaper of the two hosts as Bluehost costed just over $80 for the year. The wordpress setup was a breeze. It’s gotta be one of the slickest, one click WP setups out there. I was amazed. Of course both hosts have built in domain registering, so they score equally there. With bluehost.com, my site was up and running in just a few clicks. It seemed like we signed up, installed WP, created an email account, and got familiar with the layout in just a couple blinks. It was pretty amazing. And no errors, mind you.

Round 1:

Bluehost wins.

(Round 2: Speed and Features – coming soon)

I have to mention first though that I love Firefox on my PC at work. But I use it with the IE Tab add-on which lets me run Internet Explorer INSIDE of Firefox. I do this because some of the sites I use here nearly always require IE. I recently upgraded to IE8 which is a huge step up for a Microsoft browser. It tends to handle tabs and transparencies much better than previous versions. Ok, so I still have to check certain things with IE by itself, like SharePoint for instance, so I can see how everyone else at work will see the site, etc.

Thus using two browsers, I wanted the bookmarks to BE the same and REMAIN the same on each. So a little Googling resulted in a post from My Digital Life explaining the whole lot using XMarks browser addon. Really it’s simple. Using Firefox, download and install the addon. Then create an account and follow the steps in the setup wizard to sync your bookmarks to the XMarks server. Then in IE, download the installer and run it, continuing through the wizard again and logging into your new XMarks account and sync.  Bam! The bookmarks/favorites are synced.

I am SO glad it was that easy. I am happy to announce that this works for Safari as well and on nearly any operating system. So check it out.

Semi related, Telegraph.co.uk posted an interesting article looking back at the way 20 popular websites looked when they were first created.

Check out the article, for sure, but here are some of my favorites:

Share/Save]]> http://tech4eleven.com/399/what-will-work-with-10-6/feed/ 1 http://tech4eleven.com/391/snow-leopard-release-this-week/ http://tech4eleven.com/391/snow-leopard-release-this-week/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:45:57 +0000 Cory Church http://tech4eleven.com/?p=391 Flooding the internet is Apple’s announcement that they will be releasing the final version of Snow Leopard THIS Friday instead of next month as previously said. The update is only for Intel Macs with some other system requirements and will only be $29!

Some of the cool things Snow Leopard will provide are a 64 bit platform, allowing faster response times, Quicktime X, bigger icon views, a rebuilt Finder and iChat, HTF+ read support, so people with Windows (7) via Boot Camp can read the rest of the Mac formatted HDD, added Preview functions, and much more. Make sure to check it out and post back here if you DO upgrade…let us know how it went.

Also check out Lifehackers review of OS X 10.6

UPDATE: Not even two weeks after the huge Snow Leopard (10.6) release, 10.6.1 has been released. No new features but some good patches and security updates. Not a whole lot of news on app compatibility issues.

WINDOWS: According to Everything Guru Wikipedia, UNC “is short for Universal Naming Convention or Uniform Naming Convention, [which] specifies a common syntax to describe the location of a network resource, such as a shared file, directory, or printer.” What? Ya. Basically, in the most elementary sense, UNC is two back-slashes before a name (“\\”) and is used to access shared files or folders. So, if I wanted to access some files on a friend’s computer (on my network), at the very least,  I would go to Start>Run, type in \\myfriendsPCname and press Enter. A window will pop up on my computer showing me what folders/files I can access. My friend has to assign Share rights on what he wants me to access. Right away, this is a ton easier than using extra software or email.

Here’s how to set it up on your PC(s) on XP Pro

TO SHARE

To share a folder, right click it and go to properties.  Go to the “Sharing” tab and select “Share this folder” then give it a name. Press apply and ok….unless you want to assign permissions on it, say if you only want a certain person to have access to it, then there are more steps included. But if you just want to share it right away and with anyone, you’re done. Do this on folders, CD drives, plugged in USBs, etc. It’s never a good idea to share your entire “C:” drive though. If you want to share just a file, you’ll have to put it in a folder, as Sharing can only be set on the folder level.  One extra cool thing about sharing like this is that you CAN share a CD in your CD drive. They actually access YOUR cd on YOUR computer FROM their computer. Pretty cool. I actually did this today at work from my PC because I was too lazy to walk back to the server room to install Office on a server.

Ok, so when you press OK to accept the sharing information, look to your folder now, the folder will have a hand underneath it, signifying it’s being shared.

Share Properties

TO ACCESS

Now that your friend has some stuff to share with you, you’ll want to access it. Of course you’re on the same network, otherwise we’re talkin’ about a lot more steps. So on your PC, go to Start>Run and type in \\yourfriendsPCname and press enter. This will take you to everything you can access on your friend’s computer. To go to a folder directly, add a backslash after the above and then the shared folder name. I should mention this: to get the name of a PC, press Windowskey+Pause/Break or Right Click My Computer>Properties>Computer Name tab>Full Computer Name.That’s it.

Run Dialogue

If you’re a Linux or Mac lover, I would love to hear your procedure for doing this. Chime in below.

Click on “About” in the menu bar and you’ll be taken to the new static about me page. About Me pages are all the rave these days. Mine, although a little elementary yet, actually has some sweet stuff going on with it. Here’s how it all happened…

For a few weeks now I’ve wanted to create a  static “page” for my about me section-something I could design a little bit more than just creating a page using wordpress, which is really just in the post. I’ve been using Freeway Pro from Softpress to create VintageDoula.com so I powered it up once again and started creating my new page. Freeway will save the files and codes in a package specifically designed for the program, but inside the folders, I grabbed out the index.html file once I was finished creating it. Images inside Freeway Pro are stored inside the Resources folder, a folder I would not upload via FTP, so I needed to manually move the images over, grab the url and plug the path into the code using an free editing tool called Smultron (highly recommended). Saved and uploaded to the root directory of my FTP, I then linked to it using a super great tutorial. Let me summarize this tutorial:

Turn a Wordpress Page Into a Link:

By default, in Wordpress, you can create any page you want and it will appear in the menu at the top of your page. This page and its link are created dynamically and are hard to find in the code. So if you want to link to some other page in your menu without searching through all the code for it, you can create a file called redirect.php.

First, get a text editor, like Smultron for Mac, or any of these php editors, and type in this code:

Save it as Redirect.php and upload it to your Wordpress themes folder. Then go to where you can add/edit a Wordpress page. Type in a title like “About Me” and simply add the address of the link you want that page to go to in the body of the post. Now, look to the right side in wordpress and notice that in the drop down menu for Templates, you have one called Redirect. Select that and Publish or Update the Page. That’s it. It works like a charm.

To copy and paste the code, go to the site.

Your feedback is appreciated. Leave a comment here or on my new General Comments section in the sidebar.

Some of my other command prompt favorites are IPCONFIG, of course, for finding a machine’s IP address; TRACERT, for finding the path an internet connection takes to a specific URL*, and using the Recovery Console, FIXBOOT, for repairing the boot.ini file; and FIXMBR, for rebuilding the Master Boot Record.

____________________________

*If you’re wondering about an example path for TRACERT, below is the path or routers my computer at work in Rapid City, SD takes in order to get to this site, tech4eleven.com:

TRACERT command: 1 being start and 14 being finish

It can do quite a lot out of the designer box. It looks like it has no buttons, just a ball on top. But actually, it has a left click, right click, two side buttons, and a 360 degree scroll wheel. All that and plus being bluetooth-no weirdly placed dongles or usb-s. By the built in software, you can assign the buttons to do all sorts of things. Like button 4 (the left side button) can be used to open dashboard, or expose, or show the desktop. But what it can’t do is browse backwards in a browser.

SteerMouse can add pretty much add any command, application launching, or shortcut you want to the buttons on your mouse…like adding “back” to the side button. And it just doesn’t work with the Mighty Mouse; you can use

it on any usb mouse plugged into your mac. Steermouse did what I wanted it to do, but it moved the cursor to a dialog box’s default button, which I didn’t like, and didn’t want to take the time to figure out how to turn off, so I stopped using it. It felt like erratic mouse movements, though it might have just been a setting. Regardless, if you need added functionality to your mac mouse, SteerMouse is for you.

You can get a copy of SteerMouse by visiting my Skydrive, with all sorts of nice free apps.

So, when I’m at work and I’m dealing with graphics say for placing in SharePoint, well, there’s nothing like DCM built in. Figures for Windows-those geeky number pushers. But I figured there HAD to be something as quick and easy for my non-mac counterpart.   I found an app rightly named ColorPic.

ColorPic, like DigitalColor Meter will choose a color of any pixel on your screen. Press Ctrl+G to lock it in and input the RBG numbers into another program to get an exact color match on Windows, like Gimp. This works really well for desktop colors and web colors alike. ColorPic is free, which is always good, and it lets you do more than DCM does. You can obtain the CMYK values, the 6 digit web color code, and more. It’s pretty darn sweet.

You also read more about Windows 7 running on a Mac by seeing my post : Windows7 Beta on Macbook Pro (2 versions)

I’m using FatCow.com, which I was excited to use since I’ve read a lot about them in MacWorld and MacLife magazines. The cost is supreme at $59 a year but they also provide unlimited bandwidth and disk use. Wordpress was  easy to install once I navigated around a bit…but they did cause me some grief at first; I have to be honest. Right away, when trying to go to my site as well as the backend, I kept getting Server errors. Their customer support has always been super nice; they even called me personally to welcome me to fatcow web hosting. But this issue dragged on for days and was frustrating trying to set up anything on the new site. Finally, this week they got it ironed out and I haven’t had any problems. I felt bad for getting a little upset at them, being a tech support specialist myself; I realize some solutions aren’t as apparent as you wish them to be.

With the new site I am mostly excited about un-throttled code editing capabilities, embedding videos, customization, better stats, and control- let’s face it. Did I mention design? Oh yeah, and design. I use to blog at blogspot.com by the same name, and rarely regretted the move to a wordpress.com hosted site. The times I did were when it came to backend editing, namely code, and design, which is related. It’s amazing to me that wordpress.com will make you pay to have those capabilities, when in a competing market, Google (blogspot) takes the cake. But really, let’s be honest, Google is a massive tsunami and I’m riding the wave all the way in…ok, besides having switched from a google hosted blog to a wordpress one.

So update your RSS feed, and change your bookmarks, because http://www.tech4eleven.com is now going to offer WAY more of that good ol tech goodness, yes, right before your eyes (special effects and camera tricks included).

Belarc makes a nice little utility named Belarc Advisor, which when downloaded and ran, gathers all sorts of yummy information about your machine. From their site:  ”The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser” 

So lets say you want to sell your PC. You need some information on it in order to list it. You download belarc advisor. It results in a huge list of details, you copy and paste it in your sale listing. Easy. So easy.

For Mac: System Profiler is awesome for viewing all sorts of goodies on your machine, and its built in. The best 3rd party utility I’ve found so far is a program called Mactracker, which really is a history tool on nearly every Mac ever made, but very cool to glaze over if you’re a mac enthusiast.

Chime in if you have a quick and easy way to get what you want out of your computer.

That’s why you can make and have sweet personalized fonts in a matter of minutes. Yourfonts.com is the place to go to simply create a font in your own handwriting or maybe something you “drew” up. I’ll just let you check it as well as read this article/review by Lifehacker.com.

You can also read this article from Lifehacker.com on Fontifer , another self-creation font site, but this article also shows you how to install your created font (or any for that matter) on your system.

To download “c dot church”, my own font, click HERE.

If you read anything here, you know I nearly always explain the Mac side of life and mention briefly that the same procedure is possible (perhaps) on Windows. Well, I’m not going to throw any surprises your way today. So here’s how to sync, in this instance, your Outlook calendar, say, at work, with your iCal calendar on your sweet Mac back at your pad.

Until they come up with an easy way to direct sync, we need to sync with Google calendar. I know, one extra step and who uses internet apps anyway on the browser when everything’s making the move to the desktop? Well, we are. And it’s easy. First, not in any particular order, we make sure we have Google calendar enabled in our list of wonderful Google apps. Then we’re going to set up our Mac. Thanks to Lifehacker.com for the run through, (and the borrowed image- please don’t hate me, it’s late) I’ll explain the details here as well.

Step 1: Download Calaboration on your Mac. Ah, thanks Google. You’re so nice for cutting out the hard work. We love you. You may also want to take a look at the Lifehacker link above to see how to manually add the connection from Google cal to iCal.

Now that you have that synced, or know how to get it synced, we need to connect outlook and gcal.

Step 2: Download Google Calendar Sync on your Windows machine. Geez, thanks again Google for being so sweet. In the options, choosing 2-way sync is a must. (And for those who question this utilities capabilities of syncing Outlook on a Exchange server, the answer is Yes, it works seamlessly (on Exchange 2003)).

That’s really it. Like I said, it’s easy. You’ll just have to play around with it. I sought out this procedure ’cause I wanted a way to see my work calendar at home and syncing on Google is a way because I can also view my calendar anywhere. The only issue which still stands is 2 way syncing has some flaws right now. But it works. Thanks CalDAV. Thanks Lifehacker.com

____________________________________

Sorry, the site did not have an embed code. So here's the link.