from the edge of the deep green sea

I am being lazy today, so I will show you via youtube how to create a USB bootable drive on OS X.

You need:

• An HFS formatted USB drive that holds > 5 GB data
• An OS X disk image (you can also drag the volume I assume)

So fire up Disk Utility and do this:

Compare that to installing Windows 7 on a USB stick…think you can do it in less than 30 seconds? I think not.

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I have bitched in the past about the WRE54G wireless extender. The damn thing works, but configuration is NOTHING short of frustrating. I had the WRE54G stored away for a good while until I needed to extend my wireless network a lot more. So I decided to dust out the old bastard and give it a run for its money. Here is what I did to set up my wireless connection with these three guys:

• Airport Extreme Base Station
• Linksys WRE54G Wireless Extender
• Airport Express

BTW, if you ever need to extend ANY wireless network, go with an Airport Express, those things are a blessing. Setup is a snap, you may even find a refurbished one at the the refurbished apple store:

A while back, I saw a colleague bring 3 different timezones into Vista from the Clock control panel. I thought “wow, that is one thing OS X should have”.

A couple of days later, it hit me “OS X has had this feature since Tiger!!!”. I am a bit ashamed of actually posting how this is done since I know this might fall into the “Thanks. Capt Obvious” category, but what the hell, here is how you do it with widgets:

Technorati Tags: Mac Stuff, Mac Tutorials

Now that we are in the topic of backup and whatnot, allow me to introduce you to Mozy, which is an online backup solution. This tutorial will guide your from start to finish on what needs to be done to configure Mozy for your backups.

First, you need to sign up for Mozy. To do this, follow the following link (by doing so, both you and I will receive an extra 256 MB when signing up):

https://mozy.com/?code=T5HY7L

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Backup – not everyone does it, yet everyone needs it. If you do not backup and have yet to lose something, consider yourself a very lucky person because sooner or later, something will fail. Whether your machine crashes and damages data, or you drop your portable and mess up the hard drive, or whether someone breaks into your home and steals your stuff, it is bound to happen. You need to backup things that are irreplaceable (pictures, documents, work) on weekly basis. I have quickly grown into a backup freak and will show you in this post, how to backup some if your things in the best way possible.

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I use Synergy as an iTunes navigator, which works great. You can assign shortcuts to move to next track, pause, and so on. Another cool thing that it does is to get the artwork for the current track in case it does not already have it. Synergy, however, will not set the artwork on the mp3 itself, it will just place it somewhere on your HD. You can however, select the menu option to copy the artwork of the current track:

That is all very nice, yes – but what about the other tracks on the album that should have the same artwork? By downloading some scripts from Doug’s Applescript’s site, I was able to write a small script that will set the artwork of the current selection to that of the currently playing track. Read more to get a hold of the script.

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While browsing through some of the menus in Ecto (this application is the best blogging editor), I found some menus about Flickr incorporation. It turns out you can include Flickr pictures immediately if you download a (free) application called 1001. Once you launch the app, it will show your streams (once you have configured your flicker info)

From there you can select the image you want to display and click on the Blog This button, and after some tweaking, voilá:

That is certainly faster that my previous method.

I wanted to post some pics yesterday, and the only way I knew how to do this with the blog was to either import from iPhoto (lengthy process) or include them somehow in Flickr. I googled a bit and found a nice plugin that does the trick for you. It is called the Wordpress Flickr Post Bar.

After installing the plugin, all you do is configure your account and when you are writing your blog (inside the web editor), you get a list of images that you have uploaded to Flickr:

You can then select your image and the editor will place a reference to the image and you are done. If only there was a way to incorporate this into Ecto…damn…there IS a way!

If there is one thing in the world I cannot stand are mp3 files that have their tags messed up. If something is going to stay on my mp3 hard disk, it needs to have correct ID3 tags or it will go to the trash.

If you are unfamiliar with what mp3 tags are, please check this Wiki. In a nutshell, each mp3 file has information inside of it that can be used to tag information about the file itself. This information can be the artist, album name, track name, track number, comments, and so on. If you use iTunes, the information that is displayed on the interface is the info read by the ID3 tags, that is why if you throw in a file that has the name of “Untitled.mp3″ onto iTunes, it may display info about the song if it has it on their ID3 tags.

That being said, when you download buy an album, it may have the ID3 tags in a manner that does not fit your requirements (depending on the level of OCB that you may have). For instance, I just downloaded the following EBM album:

The songs outlined by the red rectangle above have something wrong (IMHO). The name of the band and the name of the song are on the Name column…this is unacceptable. Now in order to fix this, you could do it by hand (may take a while) or use a utility that can help you sort it out in no time.

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