Paul Shadwell RTFM

Map Any Key to Any Key on Windows 7 / XP / Vista - the How-To Geek

If you are tired of the way certain keys on your system work, such as the Caps Lock key, you can re-map them to function as a different key by using a registry hack. But there should be an easier way, right?

via www.howtogeek.com

I have been frustrated by the way the keyboard is mapped on a Macbook Pro running Windows 7 via Bootcamp.
For example, the older MBPs have the numeric pad "Enter" key on the right of the space bar and the right Apple key.
This app allows you to remap any key on the keyboard so I remapped that "Enter" key to the right Alt (Alt-Gr) key.
Highly recommend it and solves many problems with keyboard mapping especially if you have an international keyboard.

Connecting to an existing iTunes Library

While rebuilding my Mac Pro I am coming across a few issues when trying to get myself back to a fully functioning environment.

Last night I did a fresh install of Snow Leopard and this meant using the Disk Utility during install to wipe the Macintosh HD system drive before the installing the OS. Yes I did backup before I did this. What I didn't backup, because it's on an external hard drive, was my iTunes Library.

When I opened iTunes of course it didn't see my existing library, because by default, the iTunes Library is in your Home directory under Music.

Also changing the location under Preferences -> Advanced doesn't help either. So I searched on Google on moving your iTunes Library and of course this meant having a library to move but mine was already moved.

As a last resort I referred to the iTunes help which took me to this article which explains what to do and it couldn't be simpler.

Close iTunes if you have it open and then open iTunes again while holding the Alt/Option key on the Mac (hold down the Shift key on a PC) you will the be prompted to Choose Library. Simply point it to where your existing library is located (it will be the folder containing a file called iTunes Library.xml) and immediately iTunes opens as it was before. Phew!!

If you found this useful, let me know.

Snow Leopard is coming this Friday!

This Friday the 28th of August, Apples latest OS X update (10.6), Snow Leopard, will be release world wide.

I've been playing with Snow Leopard for a few months now and I'm very excited to be able to load this on all my production Macs.

As Victor Cajiao gave me a plug for my blog post about how to get the OS X DVD onto a hard drive to speed up installation, I will finally get on and do part 2. I will also update the original post so that you can see how to do this specifically with Snow Leopard.

I would be very interested to hear your feedback and if you have any comments or questions on how to do this process.

Saving Your User Settings in Windows Vista and 7 using Windows Easy Transfer.

Ever wished you could save all your settings in Windows, Office, Outlook etc and move them to another PC or virtual machine or even to a new profile? Here's how using new built-in features of Microsoft Windows Vista and the new Windows 7. This is also a great way to save all your settings before upgrading to Windows 7.

Go to the Start button

...and then click All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools and click Windows Easy Transfer

Welcome to Windows Easy Transfer

Click Next

What do you want to use to transfer items...

Click "An external hard disk or USB flash drive"

Which computer are you using now?

Click "This is my old computer"

Checking what can be transfered...

This will take a few moments depending on how much adat you have stored.

Choose what to transfer from this computer

Click Customize to see what will be backed up.

Save your files and settings for transfer

Enter a passowrd if you wish to protect the backup or click Save to continue without a password.

Save your Easy Transfer file

Select the drive you wish to save to. Click Open.

Enter a filename

Use the default filename or enter a new one, then click Save.

Estimating

Easy Transfer will now calculate how much data will be stored. Once complete, select or deselect items (you may see more than one profile if other people use this computer) click Transfer.

Saving

Save Complete

Click Next

Transfer Complete

Click Next

All done

Click Close

Energy Saving for Geeks

Today has been interesting in that I woke up and went straight to my Mac Pro, that is usually running through the night along with all my other computers, and checked Twitter. I noticed Bill Thompson mention Dr Who, don't know why that caught my eye, I'm not a big fan or anything like that but all the same, there was a link that took me to a recording or a radio interview with Andy Stamford-Clark and engineer at IBM who has wired his Isle of Wight house up to send Tweets when certain things happen.

Then after delving further I found more information about what Andy does and that his setup also monitors and tweets the electricity power consumption of the house as well as individual appliances. It was only the other day when we were faced with paying what equated to be a large electricity bill, almost double what I usually pay and I was wondering what could be drawing so much energy.

The web pages led me to find that what Andy was actually using, was a device that uses a sensor around the main power cable going into the house, that detects the flow of electrical current in the wire and that in turn is displayed wirelessly to a device with an LCD screen. The device also has a serial port allowing it to be connected to a computer. More details here.

For more detail go and take a look at his video presentation and read the interview found here. I have now ordered the monitoring hardware via eBay and I shall blog about it's installation and setup when it arrives.

I have also ordered a Viglen MPC-L for just £104.75 with £11 postage, which will run the setup described by Andy.

IBM is offering the MQTT service for free to those interested in participating in the social side of this project. I can see this becoming an ongoing project for my house in Switzerland. Stay tuned.

Not only does this look like a fun and reasonably cheap project but it can also potentially save you money spent on your energy bills. How cool is that?

I'm Back

Well actually I didn't go anywhere, at least no where exciting, it's just that every time I do something of interest and I think "I must blog about this" by the time I get round to it the moment has gone. Plus, and this is probably more of an excuse than a valid reason for not keeping my blog updated, I find it a pain to go to the website and update my blog there.

I use TypePad and although it's a great site I just find the whole process tedious and time consuming.

Now, when I did the last few blog posts, I have been using a couple of tools to do this which has proved to be much easier. On the PC I was even using the free blogging tool which is part of the Windows Live suite of free apps. The tool I use is called Windows Live Writer and for a free application it is very nice and easy to use.

But I'm trying to move away from PC apps and spend more time doing everything on my Mac. I was using Blogo but it just seemed too basic. Watching a recent SCO from Don McAllister he mentioned that he uses MarsEdit to update his blog. Although I had heard of MarsEdit, I had not tried it. So here I am telling you about it via my blog and doing so using MarsEdit! I just have the 30 day trial version and like most Mac apps, it is a fully functional trial.

Tell me about your blogging experiences and what tools do you use.

ps: It would be really nice to have a WYSIWYG interface in these blogging tools that really show you what's going on. I have nicely presented paragraphs here in MarsEdit but when I post all the text appears as one block.

pps: just discovered the paragraph item under the Markup menu.

A comment about IE6Update

I listened to Paul Boag's AudioBoo this morning regarding IE6Update and had to comment. Here’s what I said:

I completely agree Paul, this is really bad.
I think it's pretty safe to say that the majority of people still using IE6 do not have any choice in the matter, i.e. they're sitting in enterprises consisting of hundreds if not thousands of users where the process of upgrades are very strictly managed.
The biggest reason used by management for not upgrading is cost. If it doesn't effect the day today running of the business it is right at the bottom of the list of priorities. Sad but true.
Believe me when I say that most IT departments fight tooth and nail to get basic upgrades like these done but it's an uphill battle to justify the cost, especially during financial crisis times.
Of course, there are also IT departments that are ignorant to the issues if browser versions.

In addition to this comment I do have an example of IT department ignorance. A well known insurance company I used to work for has a very good and forward thinking web site that does not function well if viewed using IE6. However, 60,000 installed users within the company are still using IE6 because upgrading the web browser is the lowest priority. The people who need it, i.e. the web developers have special installations.

Unfortunately this is the sort of reality that internal IT departments are faced with and right now, IT departments are being thinned down and projects are mostly on hold unless they’re business critical.

I also dislike IE6 but as I said, most of the people who still have it, have absolutely no choice in the matter and using something like IE6Update does not help the matter, in fact it’s more likely to get you site blocked by IT if you do use it. So please don’t encourage it.

Saga of the Mac Pro Upgrade

So I had bought these 2 1TB hard drives a couple of weeks ago and my intention was to replace the system drive and the secondary drive which came with the machine and were now filling up.

Easy job I though my plan was as follows:

Backup the system drive (Macintosh HD) with SuperDuper making it a bootable drive in the process.

I backed up to a partition on a USB connected 1TB hard drive. I had already backed up Martina’s Mac Mini to a partition on the same drive.

So I now had 2 partitions on the USB drive called Martinas Backup and Pauls Backup.

I then removed the old 500GB drives and replaced then with the new 1TB drives, a fairly simple operation on the Mac Pro.

I wanted a fresh install of OS  X 10.5.6 so I booted the Mac Pro using the Leopard disk and installed the OS. Once the initial setup completed I created an Admin account and logged in. I then ran the Software Update tool and downloaded all the patches and updates bringing the 10.5.0 install up to date with 10.5.6.

The next step was to migrate my user account and settings with all the apps from my backup. So I started Migration Assistant and clicked through the setup and got to the “select a disk” question but only Martinas Backup was listed. I tried everything from powering off the drive, to restarting Migration Assistant to rebooting the Mac Pro but to no avail. No matter what I did, only Martinas Backup would appear in the drive list.

Then I thought, ok, I now have the original system disk available and I have a SATA<->USB adapter that I can use to connect the drive externally. Again, despite the drive appearing in OS X, Migration Assistant refused to see it.

Then I thought maybe it doesn’t like USB (I’m starting to clutch at straws now) so I found a Firewire 800 external hard drive and removed the drive from the case, replacing it  with the one I had removed from the Mac Pro. Migration Assistant still didn’t see it.

I then got my Macbook Pro and booted it from the Pauls Backup USB drive. I then ran Migration Assistant and selected the Migrate To option. Then on the Mac Pro I started Migration Assistant and selected the Migrate From another computer. After entering a code number and waiting a while the migration started. Initially it said it would take 22 hours to complete. In reality it took 14 hours.

What a palaver Macs are supposed to be easy right? Not always.

Using fonts from a PC on a Mac

Whilst working on a new website design I hit a problem which I am sure a lot of people have had to deal with in the past but for me this was a first.

Christine, my daughter over at http://www.wildemedia.com created a great web site design for me using Adobe Illustrator. I also have Illustrator and you’d think that would be great, same apps, everything's good. Unfortunately not quite. Christine uses Adobe CS4 on a PC and I use CS4 on a Mac. Again you’d think that would be no problem and for the most part it’s not. However, the logo she designed to go with the site used a font that is available on her PC but not on my Mac.

The customer wanted to see some variations on the logo with caps and lower case and different colours.

The file I got from my daughter was all vector graphics, great, but I needed the font. Christine wasn’t available to ask what the font was so I had to go hunting for it. Luckily I remembered a blog post that a Twitter friend had posted on his blog over at http://www.switchmac.com . It was about a tool he found that would give you the name of any font that is embedded in an image. So I went to the web site. I then used Skitch to clip the logo text, save it as a file and upload it to the web site. It told me a number of fonts that it could be. So although I was close, I still couldn’t get the cigar unless I was sure which font it was.

Then I thought, ‘hang on I have a PC here, it may have the font installed’. Sure enough there was the font on the PC. But that’s no good right? So I thought I would go and find where I could get the Mac version of the font. I found a site that wanted $29 for the font. Ok, then I looked for a font conversion tool, I mean, the PC fonts won’t install on a Mac, right? I found such a tool but at $75. It would be cheaper to buy the font.

Then I had a brainwave (I get them occasionally) The font in question was a True Type font and it would appear from what I was reading, the Mac fonts are also True Type. So I decided to try one last thing so I copied the font file from the Fonts folder on the PC and put it on my NAS where the Mac can also see the files stored there.

On the Mac I opened the NAS drive and went to the folder, there was the font file. Just out of curiosity I double clicked the font file, it opened, it saw the file as a font and not only that the dialog box that opened also had an “Install Font” button! So of course I clicked it.

Now I have the font I need on the Mac as well as on the PC. It couldn’t be easier.

Now how the licensing works for this I’m not sure, I just figured that if I own the file on my PC then use it on my Mac that’s good enough.

I’d be interested to know if you already knew about this feature?

OS X 10.5 Running in VMware Fusion

Now it's easy to install Mac OS X Server 10.5 on a virtual machine using VMware Fusion, but it's not quite so easy to do the same with the normal "Desktop" version. This is because of the licensing imposed by Apple. At least they are now open to allowing OS X Server to be virtualised and this is great news for those of us who want to test those environments. However, testing generally also requires the Desktop to be virtualised also, it just makes life so much easier (and cheaper of course) to setup, install, test and break down a virtual environment than it is to do the same in hardware.

So I've been hunting around for a while for the solution. Today I found the solution on another blog.
The blog illustrates how to install OS X 10.4 (Tiger) as a virtual machine. There was a mention in the comments that this would work for Leopard so I thought I'd give it a try. I was successful! There were a couple of modifications I had to make but other than that the instructions can be followed to the letter on 10.5 as well.

Rather than plagiarise my fellow bloggers hard work I'll just give you the link. Sven G's Post

Below are my updates to Sven G's post:

2. The mounted VM HD shows up on the Desktop as Macintosh HD which is of course the same name as the normal Macintosh HD (unless you renamed it of course). If this is the case then the OS will see the mounted drive as Macintosh HD 1.
3. You will need to show hidden files and folders to navigate to the OSInstall.mpkg. I used Path Finder to do this.
6. Remember to change the Macintosh HD to the drive name that shows up in the OS. You can find this by going to terminal and typing the following:

cd /Volumes
ls -al

You will then see a list of the mounted drives.

7. Same as step 6.

You can now install the VMware Tools as normal.
I am now testing the updates to 10.5.6.