Universal Rule

Book Reviews

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

LIFE photo archive brought available by Google -- Comment()
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google: "Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google."

This is an extremely interesting site for anyone interested in history, culture, politics, humanity, photography, ...

Transferring files to the Macbook Pro -- Comment()
I finally managed to move over my files from to old Titanium PowerBook G4 to the new Macbook Pro. In the end, I used an external USB/Firewire hard disk - using Firewire 400 with the TiBook, and USB 2.0 with the MBP. Everything seems to be more or less as it should, or I hope so.

I even got my Unix environment set up the way I want. I'm using /bin/tcsh as my shell (from old habit) and Emacs of course, with some tweaks. And I also managed to set up ssh with Mac keychain integration. That was a bit of a surprise, I didn't expect it to work right away but so it did. So, I'm happy user of the new machine.

I even did a bit of a daring thing - there was a replacement (faster etc.) hard drive delivered with the machine, which I hadn't installed because I needed to use the machine right away. Well, today I made a Time Machine backup of the MBP to an external hard disk, replaced the internal hard disk (easy to do, remove one screw only), and installed the Mac OS X and all my files from the external TM backup disk using the Mac OS X installer.

Surprisingly, there we no hiccups - well, Mail did go through all the files at startup, but after that it behaved as it should. Yes, and PowerPoint started up with a incompletely saved last file - I had forgotten to save that file to disk before running Time Machine. But in relative terms - switching from one hard disk to another without any problems - that was really something. It took about on hour, but I didn't need to do anything during that time, just wait for the data transfer to finish.

I must say that I'm impressed with Time Machine. I wish all software would work like this, just the way it is supposed to. Switching machines - or hard disks - is no pain with a system like that.