Between applying for six friggin’ jobs today, I made some major improvements in how I use my MacBook Air. This included adding some programs and doing this and that here and there:

• I used to swear by NetVibes for reading feeds from my favorite websites. I still think it’s pretty nice, but I’ve officially made the switch to Google Reader. The thing is, I’m not really sure why. Maybe it loads faster? Maybe I didn’t need my web stories all grouped neatly by website, but rather like them in one big list. Maybe I didn’t think Google owned enough of my life. I’m sorry, I can’t tell you. But I like it, and I’m sticking to it. So I’ve been using that website for a while, but today I downloaded NetNewsWire, a desktop application for reading news feeds that now syncs with Google Reader. So it’s much prettier than the GR website, and is probably faster. I’m giving it a try.
• I dropped the standard Google Gmail Notifier, which did not support multiple accounts, and replaced it with Gmail Notifr which does support multiple accounts and checks those accounts more often.
• Lacking a Microsoft Office installation, I downloaded the trial for Office 2008. I have 30 days to come up with $1000 or whatever it is to pay for it now.
• Downloaded an excellent application called Burn which is free and does much of what the $100 Roxio Toast does (which is burn DVDs.) Love it.
• I’ve officially switched from Adobe Dreamweaver to Panic’s Coda for web development. Gee, I’ll actually use most of the stuff in Coda!
• It was a couple of weeks ago, but I used GarageSale to post an item to eBay. It was a very nice experience. I’m not sure if it’s worth $35, but if I did more eBaying it might be.
• Paparazzi is a very cool little app that I’ll be using to take screenshots of websites.

I guess that’s about it, but it was a fair amount of researching and downloading and testing different versions of each application to see which I liked best.  Ok, I’m tired of staring at this computer now so I’m going to go fiddle around in the garage like I know what I’m doing.

I recently was able to upgrade my Mac (mini) to OS X Leopard thanks to a generous friend. One of the things I was looking forward to most from this upgrade was the use of Time Machine. Time Machine, if you don’t already know, is Apple’s new software that takes over the tedious and easily forgettable task of backing up your computer to an external hard drive. It’s pretty cool how it works, because you open up the crazy, space portal thing and you tell it you want to move this particular file back to, oh, say, Saturday’s version, before I messed it up by deleting it or saving over it. So it does a cool warp tunnel effect thing and the file is right back the way it was on Saturday. Yayy!

So, I have a hard drive I can use, and lots of files I want to protect, so I plugged them in and clicked on Time Machine. Oh, it wants to erase my hard drive. Huh? See, I have been using this external hard drive to back up files from this Mac and also my Windows laptop. But, Time Machine wants to use Apple’s super-special HFS+ disk format, one that is not compatible with Windows. But I still want to put Windows files on there, too!

So here’s what I did for anyone else out there searching for a solution:

1. I used Partition Magic on my Windows laptop to format my hard drive into 2 partitions, both FAT32 (Windows and Mac can both write to this)

2. Then when I plugged the drive into the Mac, I told Time Machine to use the second, newly created partition. So it did, and erased it and created it’s own HFS+ partition. So now it works! Now half is used for the Windows laptop, and half is used for Time Machine on the Mac Mini!

At least I think it works. I’m backing up the laptop now using a program called SyncBack. Then I’ll plug in to the Mac and let Time Machine do its thing. I’ll let you know if anything goes terribly wrong.

Also, I’m planning on hooking both computers up to a USB hub so that I won’t have to switch the USB cord from one to the other all the time. That should be nice.