elf's Apple PowerBook G4 Journal

There were a few things I wondered about when I bought a HFS+ formatted Seagate portable drive: 1) is hfs+ written on a PPC computer readable on an Intel computer 2) can I boot off the external drive via TimeMachine 3) can I restore a PPC TimeMachine image onto an Intel computer; e.g. my Powerbook dies and I get a Macbook Pro.

A revealing article on formatting filesystems using DiskUtility indicates that things may not go as well as I had hoped for (or planned).

The Palm Pre went on sale today. It is the result of mostly former Apple employees. It's greatest innovation seems to be webOS, a replacement for the decrepit PalmOS.

A strange thing happened while I was taking out the Trash today...

I deleted a 700MB file and I accidently picked "Secure Delete Trash". Well, the CPU meter red-lined (I run MenuMeters) and stayed that way for a while. After about a minute, I realized what I had done and decided to cancel the delete, but the Delete dialog wouldn't respond when I clicked on the X. The laptop still remained responsive though. So I switched to Terminal and ran top and found that 72.4% of the CPU was used by an application called Locum. After about 8 minutes, the secure delete completed.

I decided to do a bit of research for Locum and found a great explanation from a Googler called Greg Miller, who even points to the word's etymology.

That's the most fun I've had talking out the trash.

Updated to Firefox 3.5. Everything seems to have gone smoothly. Noscript and Update Every extension updated; the Check Links extension didn't, unfortunately.

If I was going to buy a new Mac today, I would order the 17 inch Macbook Pro because it is currently the only model that has a matte screen option and an Expresscard slot. I need a new Mac because my 1.67GHz Powerbook cannot play HD content (1024x720 H.264 encoded) without dropping frames resulting in choppy playback. And since video cameras now shoot HD I would need a computer that can handle editing HD as I am also considering getting a video camera (perhaps the Flip or something else).

However, what the current Macbooks are missing is support for BluRay (read and writetable) discs even though I refuse to pay $30 for a Bluray movie (I even refuse to buy a DVD that costs more than $10 now). I think buying a latop today with a lifetime of 5+ years requires BD support. I think Apple prefers people to buy HD video via iTunes rather than media so I don't know when BD drives will appear in Macs.

I'm waiting to see if the Tablet is released in October and I think I can wait until January to see what the new Macbooks will offer.

The ASC now has podcasts by various cinematographers.

Appleinsider is reporting that the long-awaited tablet will be available (announced?) in 1Q 2010. It will have a PA-designed CPU not an Intel Atom.

The rendering is missing a video camera in the frame.

Ian Eure has provided a stable Emacs 23.1 for OS X. The Carbon Emacs port was deprecated in favour of a unified NextStep port which is currently unusable.

John Hughes passed away yesterday. Two of my favourite movies that he wrote/directed, are Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Uncle Buck. If I ever felt sad, watching either of those movies would always cheer me up.

A faculty member, who owns a Macbook, recently bought a new Mac Pro and wanted all his settings copied from this laptop to the desktop. So he grabbed his Time Machine external disk (which was backing up his laptop) and plugged it into his Mac Pro and looked for some way to restore his latest files back onto the Mac Pro.

He gave up in frustration and called me asking how to do it. So I sat down and tried to do the same thing and Googled for instructions on how to do it and also got frustrated.

We decided that we were doing something wrong because two hours later we still hadn't gotten any further. And I said something like, "We must be doing something wrong because Apple would have thought of this as people buy new Macs everyday and transfer their files and settings from their old Macs on to the new one."

And then I realized that we were going about it the wrong way. We should have been using Migration Assistant! And once we used it all worked out perfectly.

I think Time Machine needs to have some sort of setting that lets users restore an entire computer.