AVetter

Today I found another page where you can loose another part of you privacy if you like to tell the whole world your whole life. On the Plazes page you get a login. With the login you and your firends are able to keep track of your daily activities.

In my opinion this kind of “observation” is a lot to much. If the data is stored in a db everyone who has access to this db can follow you and gets a lot of private information about you. With this data it’s possible to create a profile of every single person. Unless you have no scruple to give away this kind of information you should listen to the Chaosradio or read the artikles on the CCC page.

In the last few months I had to setup some new macBooks and iMacs for my friends. All of them are new in the mac world and this brought me up to write a little article about some useful keyboard shortcuts and about some utilities.

First of all I want to start with the shortcuts, because in my opinion it makes you much faster to walk through your system only with the keyboard. However a lot of persons don’t always agree. Like every time in your life it’s the best thing to try it out and decide for yourself. You can only disagree if you tried it out….

cmd is the same as the “apple” key.

• Eject CD:
  • F12 (to eject a cd at boottime)
  • eject-button
  • cmd + e (also to unmount a selected disk)
• Search (is not only to search for a string, but also to run a application e.g. “Firefox” and than press enter):
  • cmd + space (in the right corner a small window pops up for the search string (spotlight))
  • shift + cmd + space (only if quicksilver is installed)
• Firefox:
  • cmd + l (to jump into the url field)
  • cmd + k (to jump into the search field)
  • ctrl + tab (switch between tabs)
  • cmd + t (create new emtpy tab)
  • cmd + n (create new window)

Finally I give you a list of useful tools to work with the osx.

• Quicksilver (Search machine)
• iGTD (Getting things done)
• Firefox (Browser)
• FileZilla (FTP Client)
• Adium (Messenger)
• Skype (Messenger with voice and video)
• Azureus (Filesharing)
• TrueCrypt (Encrypt data to use them under OSX, Linux, Windows)
• GIMP (like PhotoShop but free)

Today I had to make a new experience with my macBook. Up to now I was quite happy with it. However this morning I had to work under Windows XP and once again I got a blue screen. After that I tried to restart, however there was no reaction only a white screen and the cooler was loud. My last backup is from yesterday evening so the old data is still secure but I think I need a lot of time to repair it, because I have never done this before with an apple machine. Up to now I have only experiences repairing a linux machine.

First of all I had to take the next train home so that I can start repairing it. However the next problem came up, because the macBook just ignored the OSX cd and I was not able to eject the cd. I tried every single option to eject the cd (F12, Eject button, Apple+E) nothing, and then after some tries I was able to get this cd. At this moment I was a kind of scared because what can you do without booting from a cd? As the next step I tried the next cd (Linux live cd) (Boot from cd: C) to check the partitions and to make some diagnostics. And that’t the point where I am at the moment, I hope I can tell you some good news in the short future.

Update:
Good and bad news at the same time. First of all the good one. The time machine is great, because I could restore my old osx with the backup image from yesterday. But my windows is gone with all data, because I’ve never bakuped it. It looks like the windows crash was a little bit to hard for my partitions, because the whole partition table was damaged and I was not able to repair it. Anyway I’m really happy that the main os is back =), so that I only have to reinstall one system. At the moment I’m thinking about to install windows Vista to give it another try. Up to now I had installed it once but only for a week or so and in addition this installation was on a slower machine.

If you have any experiences with windows Vista on a macBook I would be thankful about a comment.

Update:
Two days later I had again the same problem. This time the OSX freezed totally and I had to turn off my macBook. After I started it again, nothing happend. The only thing I heard was the cooler and the harddisk was very noisy. In this moment I recognized that my fear was correct and I have to get a new hd as soon as possible. However the desing of the macBooks is perfect and it was easy to change the hd. The next step was again the same as above, restore my old osx with the time machine and install windows again (This time no problem).