Limit Time Machine disk usage on external drives
Time Machine is a very simple and elegant backup solution for Mac OS, with an intuitive restore browser. The problem with Time Machine however, is that it takes up all free disk space before starting to erase old backups. This is no problem if you have a dedicated Time Machine disk, but most people usually want to keep other things on the very same disk.
Time Machine uses different methods for network backup and local backup. One way of limiting remote backups is covered in an earlier article called “Create a fixed size network storage for Time Machine“, so this will instead focus on limiting the disk usage on locally connected disks, such as USB or Firewire.
First make sure that you are using a HFS formatted disk, since we are going to resize the partition. Start Disk Utility and select your external disk from the left menu. Click the Partitions tab and you will be presented with your entire disk. Drag the bottom-right handle of the partition up and make it as small as you want your Time Machine to be. When you are satisfied with the new size, click the plus button at the bottom to add an additional partition to occupy the free space.
Disk Utility
Now open up the Time Machine preferences and select your disk!
Time Machine Preferences
The additional volume can be used to store anything you want. Just remember to eject the disk properly before you disconnect it from your Mac!
Address Book on Mac shows the wrong certificate
I recently wanted to email a recipient, for which I had the certificate. The problem was however, that he has an old certificate which has expired, and a new valid one. For some reason though, Address Book associates the old certificate with the email address instead of the new one.
Inspect Certificate in Adress Book
I still haven’t found a way to associate the new certificate with the user.
Bought Coda in a big Panic.com sale
I have long been looking for the perfect editor for my Mac. Ever since I bought the latest Macheist bundle I have been using Espresso, which has been working fairly well. It is a very immature editor though with lots of essential features missing.
I heard that Panic is having a sale on Coda (hurry, two days remaining!) so I decided to get buy it immediately, since it seems to be a very competent editor with a solid reputation.
My first experiences have been very positive! It has innovative features, looks good and does its job very well. I especially like the excellent Subversion integration and remote support via FTP, SFTP etc.
When I have used Coda for a week or two, I’ll write a proper review with images and everything.
Things vs The Hit List vs Omnifocus
I have been using Things for a long time, both on my Mac and iPhone. While being very good at what it does and being visually beautiful, I have lately been having lots of trouble finding a good solution for a “Waiting For” focus, planner, setting a starting date, subtasks and other minor things. Their support forum is full of these requests and many other too.
Both The Hit List and Omnifocus do not suffer from these shortcomings, and have other benefits too. THL has a very nice planner where you can see items due today, the next days, next week, month etc. It makes it very easy to get an overview on what and when things have to be done.
The one thing missing in THL at the moment is iPhone sync, which is where Omnifocus shines! It has a very competent syncing framework and a native iPhone client (a bit pricey though). Omnifocus follows the principles of Getting Things Done almost to the letter, which may be too rigid at times, and it does not have support for tags at the moment.
What to do? I have invested in Things for the Mac and for the iPhone, but I have considered the idea of moving to Omnifocus for the moment, and maybe returning to Things when it has matured somewhat. I like THL quite a lot, but without syncing with an iPhone application, it’s useless for me.
Safe document writing using Dropbox
Lots of people who write articles or create content in any form, often find themselves generating lots of files. A writer will for instance probably have lots of article drafts laying around. Everyone have different solutions for revision control and backup, ranging from a simple manual file copy to using a full-fledged revision control system such as Subversion.
For everyone else, there is a simple solution for keeping backups of your work in progress, as well as being able to retrieve any previous revision. In addition to all this, it even lets you sync files between multiple computers and access your files online from any computer with internet access.
I guess you know by now that I am talking about Dropbox, a service available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It installs a small application on your computer which monitors a configurable directory for changes and uploads them automatically to the Dropbox servers.
The free version offers 2 GB of space, which should be enough for most people. For photographers and other people dealing with lots of large files, there also a premium option available which gives you 50 GB for $99 per year.
The web interface is beautiful and easy to use for navigating your Dropbox and downloading the files. This is also the place for viewing older revisions for your files and delete, copy, rename and delete them.
A very handy feature is the ability to share folders with other Dropbox users! If you are working together with other people in a project, just share a folder between you and everyone will instantly have access to all changes in the project folder – automatically.
There is even a way of sharing files with non Dropbox users. There is a special folder in the root of the Dropbox named “Public”. Putting files here makes it possible to right-click on the files and copy a public URL for it. To let other people download the file, it’s just a matter of sharing the link with them. They can’t of course make changes to it, nor view its revision history.
Another special folder in the Dropbox root is the Photos folder, which creates instant photo albums for viewing on the web by anyone. This is definitely the easiest way of getting a photo album up on the web, since you only need to copy or move the pictures to this special folder on your computer – Dropbox does the rest.
All iPhone users out there, and possible other phone owners, can access the iPhone web interface too for downloading files in the Dropbox. It is even possible to view the uploaded photo galleries.
There is a tour available on the website which explains all features more in-depth.
Upcoming features include:
- Timeline based undo
- Online visualization for any file type
- An iPhone application/interface that let us download files of interest (pdf, docs, pictures..)
- Watch any folder support (configurable per host)
- Better shared folder controls (permissions, etc.)
- Online edition for text files
- Add friends
- Improve Upload Speed
- Group accounts
If you decide to give Dropbox a go, consider using my referral link when you sign up. That way, both you and I get additional storage for free!
Disclaimer: From this article it may seem like I work for Dropbox, but I don’t. I just like their service a lot!
4 Essential Mac Applications, and 1 bonus
My brother was recently in the market for a new laptop, and I helped him with the reasearch as usual. He ended up with a Macbook in the end, and being a first-time Mac user I of course helped him get started.
What I didn’t realize is that there are some essential applications I have collected over time, which everyone may not know about. They tend to make things much easier.
One of the “features” that need fixing in OS X is the way sleeping is implemented. When you close the lid of the computer, it enters sleep as usual, but it also does the hibernation step – meaning that it saves the contents of the memory to disk, in case of a power failure.
While this may have its benefits, I find it mostly annoying and it means being careful handling the computer until the disk has stopped spinning. Well, no more. There is a smart program called SmartSleep which makes it possible to reap the benefits of both sleeping methods at once!
The idea is that since you probably won’t need the hibernation functions until your battery is almost depleted, it will only be enabled when the battery charge becomes low (configurable threshold)! This means that the computer will go to sleep much faster in normal circumstances, and when the power is critically low, it will revert to the default sleep plus hibernate option. This makes it possible to resume the session even when the battery has been totally depleted.
Media! The Mac needs to be able to play the various media file formats out there, such as Matroska and Windows Media. Perian and Flip4Mac takes care of all your codec needs, and since they provide filters for Quicktime, you may continue to use your Quicktime Player or even iTunes for viewing this content!
The final application for this time is Growl, which provides a system-wide and well supported method of providing unobtrusive user notifications. This may not seems like a big deal, but it makes it easier to focus on what’s important.
Just one more thing! This isn’t an application, but it something Mac users should be aware of. If you have noticed that your pictures, videos or other things look washed out, it might be time to modify your gamma settings.
The default gamma on the Mac is set to 1.8, while most other use 2.2. Experiment with this and see what you prefer. G Ballard provides some more insight and howtos on this issue. There are even some rumors floating around that Apple will change the default gamma to 2.2 in the upcoming Mac OS 10.6 – Snow Leopard.
Download links
Enable 1Password in Safari 4 beta
Apple just released a beta version of Safari 4 with lots of new features. Users of 1Password might notice that it doesn’t work in the new version. To fix this, close Safari and 1Password and edit the following file:
/Applications/1Password.app/Contents/Resources/SupportedBrowsers.plist
Find the Key named Safari and look for MaxBundleVersion underneath. You will see 5528.1 as the maximum version. Change that to 5528.16, save and quit. Now you can reenable Safari from the 1Password preferences and then start Safari 4 and add the button to the toolbar. Voila!
Mac OS X 10.5.6 released
OS X 10.5.6 has now been released! Lots of things has been updated, and some highlights follow:
- Address Book
- Airport
- iChat
- Graphics
- MobileMe
- Time Machine
- Safari
- … and more!
Macrumors has the details on their forum.
Some people have been reporting problems with the update as usual. If in trouble, just get the Combo Update directly from Apple.
Spotify — the future of music
Spotify, now in public beta, takes a whole new approach to music. All music resides on the Spotify servers, and as a user, you stream the music using the internet.
Where it gets interesting is that you can either pay a fixed fee and listen all music you want without any interruptions. There is also a free option, where short commercial messages are inserted between songs in intervals which seem to be around half an hour.
Since the software is in public beta, you need an invite to use the service. If I happen to have an invite, I will of course share it with commenters to this post. There is another option though — paying for the service for a month. If you like the service after using it for a month, just continue paying or terminate the subscription. Your account will then become a free account, and you can continue to use Spotify, but with the ads injected.
There is a Windows and Mac client available at this moment. There have been reports that the Windows version works fine in Linux using Wine, so definitely try it out.
So how does is look like? The following view shows what is new in Spotify.
The next image shows the top list. This can be customised to only show a specific country or the whole world.
The main album view looks like the following. On the top, there are five top hits for that particular artist. It is followed by all albums available, and singles follow. The next section is devoted to albums where the current artist has one or more tracks, which are highlighted.
I have some suggestions to make Spotify even better (in no particular order):
- Last.FM integration.
- Music browser (browse by genre, year, artists etc.).
- Mechanism to correct faulty tags.
- Social part where users can share songs, playlists and watch each others listening habits.
- iPhone application
Some of these points seem to be in progress right now, but time will have to tell what will happen in the future when the services goes mainstream, which I am sure they will, as long as they can provide a smooth service without interruptions and errors.
Notebook 3 – OneNote for Mac?
Since switching to a Mac, there has always been one application for which I haven’t been able to find an equivalent. Windows users will undoubtedly have heard of Microsoft OneNote, which is the de-facto note taking application. Linux users have had Basket which does the same thing, but perhaps not as feature rich as OneNote.
There are lots of good note-taking applications out there for the Mac. None of these do however have the intuitive and easy to use interface bundled with the annotation features of OneNote. Some of the applications I have tried and have been using:
I finally found the Circus Ponies website which have a product called Notebook 3. I watched the screencast which shows most features in the application, and it seemed like a very interesting application to try out – and I was right.
Notebook 3 has everything one needs to read, write, collect and manage large information chunks. It can be used by students, in meetings, project management or almost anything. For an in-depth review, have a look at the above mentioned screencast.
The following image shows off some of the features of the application. Click on it for the full version.
So what are you waiting for? Head over to the Circus Ponies website and download the application.
Do you know other applications for the Mac which have similar qualities as OneNote?