It looks like our friends at Now have finally heard the customer base and are trying to finally release a new version of Now Up To Date and Contact labeled NightHawk. For those of us using it, there seems to be hope that all of the ballast of the old code base will be shed in order to boost performance and reliability. I would certainly appreciate it. The big question remaining is whether or not Now can beat other vendors to the punch. I am most excited to see how Apple will stack up with their suite of products, as I anticipate major updates to Mail, iCal, and AddressBook in light of the iPhone this year. Your thoughts?
Category Archives: Software
Attempting ‘all-in-one’ PC Mod–Turning Garbage into Gold!
Hey, folks! I just grabbed an old all-in-one pc off the scrap heap, and I am going to try to convert it into something actually useful – a touchscreen bar-top jukebox. Only problem, I want to do it on the cheap! Can I get some feedback regarding any ‘skinable’ open source setup that I might be able to put on this thing?
Tech specs — It’s got a honking POWERHOUSE under the hood! Celeron 566 with 512 of PC133 on an ultra modified mATX framework (I think). It’s a crap heap, but hey, it comes with a 15.4″ LCD screen with a 2.5″ flat bezel frame and a decently sturdy and quiet case.  I may be stripping this down and airbrushing some nice enamel on it, but who knows. The value price of FREE was well within my budget!
Any sage advice from the GG Open Source crowd would be greatly appreciated! I would think it would be cool if there was some Media Center like apps out there that could run on this, that shows album art with a customizable GUI.
Any ideas?
Backing up a small business, Help wanted
Does anybody have any thoughts on how to successfully backup a growing small business? We have a total of about 100GB that we currently backup on a daily basis to an external 2.5″HD (very portable). The amount of backup storage we need is increasing at a slow but steady rate, so that we will be exceeding it within a few weeks. When we do, I have to manually archive files on the client computers to reduce the amount of data that gets backed up. This is very time consuming and defeats the purpose of the automated task idea. In addition, there is only one backup set. The data gets overwritten/added on to on a daily basis. FYI, we run Dantz Retrospect to pull the files from 5 clients and one server (all OS X).
So here are the two goals we are trying to achieve:
1) Increased backup security by going to 2 or more sets (Right now there is only one medium, and once that gets overwritten or if it should ever break, there is no other backup layer)
2) Increased storage capacity to allow for future growth (Right now we have to either manually archive or buy a bigger HD each time we exceed our current GB limit)
Any thoughts on the subject are greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tim.
…formerly known as Blogwave Studio
The next gen of Blogwave Studio has been in limbo/development for quite a while. I visited the site today not expecting to see anything new but was supprised to see that the new version has been released… iStage… formerly known as Blogwave Studio. It looks like a completely new application with a host of new features. I’ll be downloading it tonight and checking it out. I’ll let you know how it is.
Open-Source Genealogy?
Has anyone tried any open-source genealogy programs out there? It seems there’s a standard for storing genealogical data called GEDCOM, and there are various open-source programs that use it. The combination of something like gramps and PHPGEDVIEW seems promising for a web-viewable family history.
I just had to get some non-mac posts up here. I mean, what’s the big deal with the black MacBook. IBM’s had black laptops for years!
Clone OS X system folder
Does anybody have a recommendation for a free utility that allow me to clone an active OS X system folder to an external drive and make it bootable from there?
VM on Intel Macs
As some of you may have already seen, Parallels -a company specialized in vm ware- is now offering v2.1 of their workstation virtualization software for Intel Macs. This is much more along the lines of Virtual PC and IMHO a more interesting approach for running a guest OS on the Mac. This makes me want to go out and get my hands on an Intel Mac to testdrive… Maybe one of you guys is in a position to test this (Patrick?). Certainly an interesting topic for a GG&M.
Win XP on the Mac, now officially supported
Apple apparently decided to not leave it up to hackers to get Win up and running on their new Intel machines. Check out Boot Camp (for now). I have no desire to run Win on my Continue reading Win XP on the Mac, now officially supported
UbuntuBook, ctd.
And yes, it can work. Grant and I successfully installed Ubuntu’s Breezy Badger on a vintage 500MHz iBook. This time we have a filesystem complete with the Nautilus file browser. Online updates downloaded and istalled successfully, too. We were trying to set it up with the latest Firefox browser and Thunderbird email app to use it as a lightweight web station. Does anybody know how to actually install Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu? Being the ignorant Mac users we are, we were hoping for an installer to do the trick, but we were unable to get that going… Any thoughts?
Google Buys Writely
It’s official, Google has aquired Writely. Interesting times we are living in indeed. So what do ya’ll think? Is Google going to try to compete with MS in the web office space? Is it just a front end for the documents you will store and create on your Gdrive? I would love to hear your takes on this.