Friday, December 19, 2008

Getting iPod controls to appear on iPhone in Sleep Mode

When the iPhone is in sleep mode (i.e., "locked"), double click on the
home button and iPod controls appear on the screen.

Shortcut to Creating Aliases

To create an alias, click on the icon,
hold down command-option and drag the icon to create an alias

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Reformat FAT32 Drive to HFS+ When Disk Utility Gives an Error

I bought a new Seagate 1.5 TB drive (Windows version, which is cheaper than the Mac version, and I don't need firewire). Usually, reformatting a FAT32 Windows drive to Mac's HFS+ format is a snap in Disk Utility. However, it gave me an error and wouldn't format it.

After looking around, I found the solution at
http://www.wilko.com/weblog/index.php?url=archives/112-Reformatting-a-FAT32-drive-to-HFS+-Never-trust-a-GUI.html#feedback

Just open Terminal and type
diskutil eraseDisk "Journaled HFS+" "[DRIVE NAME HERE]" disk1

In about a minute, the drive is HFS+ formatted.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Saving Autorecovery Files - Deeper Safety net

I have MS Word set to save autorecovery files every minute. This works fine if there's an actual crash. But Word deletes these autorecovery files if you close the Word file normally. But what if you do something stupid - like close a file by checking "don't save changes" when you actually did want to save?

Solution: I have Synchronize Pro X set to check every time the backups folder notes a change (i.e., everytime an autorecovery file is created) and to save that to a different folder. That way, you're essentially saving a copy of the file every minute for safekeeping.