Ask Bob Rankin: How Can I Check for Hard Drive Damage?

Click to read more from Bob Rankin

If, like me, you are a MacHeretic and are still learning the PC operating system, I found a valuable resource for help:
From Ask Bob Rankin:

Every operating system can check a hard drive for bad sectors. In versions of Windows prior to XP, the DOS utility CHKDSK was used at the command line level. Later versions of Windows use this procedure:

• Open the Start Menu and click on My Computer
• Right-click on the icon representing the hard drive in question and select Properties
• On the Tools tab, click the Check Now button under "Error-checking"
• On the following popup window, check the box labeled "automatically fix errors" and "scan for and attempt to repair bad sectors"
• Click OK

You will have to restart Windows because the error-checking utility cannot run while Windows is running. The tests and repairs will take a significant amount of time on a large hard drive; go to lunch or happy hour. When the tests for hard drive damage end, Windows will restart automatically. A report will be available after the error-checker does its job.

Click on the image above and subscribe to Rankin's e-mail list for more tips and information. Click the link "Ask Bob Rankin" to read this article in full. There are instructions for Macs there. Perhaps I'm not a MacHeretic as much as bi-platform girl.
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Pansy's "Life Poster": How To Make It

There is a new way to make collages and life posters at the HP Community Mosaic site. This site works in conjunction with the Flickr HP Community Mosaic Group. I used these tools to create Pansy's life poster above. The directions below are for Macs. Hopefully, a PC user will use the comments to modify/correct these directions for PCs.

1. Select all of the photos that you want to use (a minimum of 10 is suggested).
2. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag them with a very unique tag so that you can identify them in the group photo pool later. I used "meeyauw" and "Pansy."
3. Join the Flickr HP Community Mosaic Group.
4. Send your selected photos to the group.
5. Return to the HP Community Mosaic web site.
6. See the mosaic in the bottom left quadrant of the screen? Click on that.
7. In the next screen, click in the text box and type your unique tags. If you have just uploaded your photos to the group, it may take a couple of minutes for them to be seen by the system. Be patient, it works.
8. Click "generate." A new Flash screen will appear with your photos.
9. Click "customize and print." Another Flash screen will appear with a white sheet of "paper" with your photos on it.
10. Click and drag your photos around until you have what you want. If you want to discard a photo, simply drag it off of the sheet of paper. When you are finished, click "print it!."
    
11. The rest of the directions are for Mac only if you would like to manipulate this collage image before printing.
12. After you click "print it!" on the HP site, a page set up dialog box appears. Click OK.
13. Now a Print dialog box appears. Click "Preview." Keep the HP window open on your desktop, just "in case."
14. Preview will now create a .pdf file for you, and you can now create a .jpg image from this.
15. If you like what you see, continue. If not, return to #10 above.
16. Choose the "select tool" in Preview. Draw a rectangle around your collage, trimming off any excess white edges you may not want.
17. Now we will crop that image. Press  + K and a crop dialog box appears. Click OK.
18. Now you have a new .pdf page with your cropped image. Go to the File Menu and select "save as . . . "
19. In the save dialog box, select JPG, name your file, save it, and you are done!

This is a very awkward way to make a collage, but it is the only way I have been able to do this with free software on a Mac. Which is so irritating! I took my collage of Pansy and used Photoshop Elements to fill some white spaces with color. I then used ImageWell to frame the image. Is there any easier way? I hope so.

Please be aware that any photo that you put into the HP Community Mosaic Group photo pool is available to anybody anywhere to use for a mosaic. This is the best use for these tools: you can create a mosaic of anything you desire (like trees), simply by inputting the tag you want at the HP mosaic site. If you don't want anybody using your photos, don't put them there. When I called up my photos of Buddy for a collage, I got somebody's photo of a hat!

I wanted to make one collage of all seven of my cats and announce my new Catster membership and learn from you about Catster activities. But this method of making a collage is so cumbersome that I am re-thinking that. If we have a snowstorm and a snowday, perhaps I will spend the time to do it. Right now, I have too many photos to choose from, so this method of making a collage would be very lengthy.

A note to Mom Unplugged: this is what I was going to do for the Christmas week Unplugged Project. A tad late, huh? This was also going to be my Cats On Tuesday post for this past week. Late again. But at least I got it in for Caturday.

Technorati Tags: HP Community Mosiac, Flickr, Preview, ImageWell, Photoshop Elements, photo collage, Macintosh, Mom Unplugged, Unplugged Project, Cats On Tuesday, Catster, Caturday
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Wordless Wednesday: My MacBook's Hospital

I picked MacBook up tonight.
A two and a half hour drive to Small Dog.

The cost of my glass of milk? $268.97.

Visit more participants by clickingWordless Wednesday

Technorati Tags: Wordless Wednesday, smalldog.com

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Puter Woes

Sunday night, Amy made blueberry muffins. I got my glass of milk and my muffin and went to my beautiful MacBook and poured the milk over it. I dropped my glass, flipped the computer upside down, forced a shut down. After awhile, I cleaned the outside and checked the battery. It looked fine and was not dripping. But it wouldn't start up again. I laid it upside down on towels overnight. At 3 AM the machine worked fine. At 6 AM, the M key had stopped working. I have an external keyboard and that worked. But I can't have a beautiful MacBook without an M key. So it is at smalldog.com being fixed now.

While it is there, I am using my Acer laptop from school. A Windoze machine. I am not happy. I feel as if I am blundering about the Internets blind. I have no weather, photos, or view of the state of the nets. I don't have iPhoto for my photos. I don't even have photos (because I go to work in the dark and come home in the dark.) I don't even know how much money I have because my Quicken is on the Mac (I have several backups of all of my data for everything, though).

I had just begun learning how to create fractal images and now I don't have my software for the Photo Hunt tomorrow. But I'm going to start using my Macintosh iBook and install the software that I need. I should have done that days ago but the iBook is very slow (7 years old) and frustrating to use. Slower is better than PC.

So my whine is over. It is anime movie night at the library tonight. I will be out all day tomorrow. The big storm is all day Sunday, so I will be visiting folks then. We are forecast to get 16.5 inches (42 cm) of snow according to the NOAA model. We'll see.

PS: that glass of milk? It will cost me $214.50 parts and labor.

I will have my MacBook back before Christmas. But I don't know if I will be able to blog much until it is home.

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New Haven: Late At Night

We stayed up late last night. Here, Anna (with her lava cake with Cool Whip) catches her e-mail on the old iMac G4 (800 MHz). They also use this Mac to stream music. Aaron is on the other side of this computer room on a Mac Pro (2x2.5 GHz Dual Core Intel Zeon, 5 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 FB DIMM; 4 cores with a bus speed of 1.33 GHz (phew I hope I got all that down right)):

Aaron took a break from his work to show me how he would have photoshopped my crow photo (a photo that I worked on with filters from Photoshop Elements based on things I have learned from Rachel Carson Designs Friday Filter Challenge) that will be posted on Halloween week. I will also show Aaron's creation that you see part of here. He uses a Wacom graphics tablet in his work. He prefers using layers in Photoshop instead of filters.

A tighter view of what he is doing to my photo. My tiny MacBook laptop seems like a toy next to this magnificent Macintosh that Aaron works on. I have never in my life seen applications run so fast. Photoshop and Aperture, so slow on my MacBook as to make them intolerable to use, just sing.

Technorati tags: iMac MacBook Mac+Pro Wacom+Graphics+Tablet Photoshop
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Mac OS/OS X Welcome Movies Through the Ages

Mac OS/OS X Welcome Movies Through the Ages: "That’s the OS X Leopard welcome movie that you’ll be watching in the next few weeks once Leopard is launched. The new OS is sure to cure cancer, AIDS, and IBS, so you might as well go buy an iMac right now."

Mac+OS+X+Leopard

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Photo Hunters: Happy

I've had a bad night. Mathematics is soothing. I found this puzzle at Let's Play Math and solved it. It's an easy one and has made me happy. I played with my demo of iWork '08 to make this slide. There is no save function on my demo, so I used Grab to make a screen shot of my work. Then I had to use iPhoto to crop it. Click on the jpeg and it will open in a new window, large enough for you to read it.

Happy Hunting. Hope you are all doing well.

Technorati tags: PhotoHunt Ahmes Ahmose Rhind+papyrus pi mathematics geometry+puzzle
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Speaking Australian (Or Why I Love My Mac)

Catch Up What's Going On Around Here from Kat's Cradle.
(click on the image to see what I mean)
I had forgotten this tool that we have.
Now I don't have to ask for translations.

Technorati tags: punnets Macintosh contextual+dictionary

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OMG! All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash!!!

How many web apps do you use?

• gmail
• Google Reader
• Google Calendar
• blogs
• Flickr
• MapMyRide
  
• Zooomr
• Twitter
• Pownce
• YouTube
• bugguide.net
• tumblr
• del.icio.us
• digg
• librarything
• OK Cupid!
• 43 Places
• 43 Things
• MyChores
• Vermont251
• Technorati
  

What are the ones I have forgotten?
(This Wallingford, CT dude was obviously using a Mac!)
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Mac v PC

Read the Mr. Mac Man article about Jerry Manock formerly of the Macintosh design team.

I used Skitch to grab the section of the page at 7Days.

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A Beautiful Moth and An Awful Spider

Be sure to click on both photos to enjoy them fully. These are two of my best so far.

Blinded Sphinx Moth (Paonias excaecatus)

Wingnut pointed out this moth on the house this afternoon. It also looked like a dead leaf. It was quite a beauty. The moth was identified by J.D. Roberts at bugguide.net. The next photo is very scary. Be warned!

Barn Spider (male Araneus)

I was horrified when I enlarged this photo. I was less than six inches away from this monster when I took this shot. It was identified by Jeff Hollenbeck at bugguide.net. Details:

Big: 2.5 inch (6.4 cm) diameter body; 5 inch (12.7 cm) wide with legs not spread out.
So ugly it makes me shudder.
Black bristly hair all over its body.
Legs have green/black bands.
Perspective: you are seeing the top of the spider only.
Very common here in Vermont, always found outdoors (thank the Lord).

Wingnut and I finished networking the iBook and MacBook. The iBook required huge numbers of updates. The cats have nearly chewed through the power cord but it is working well.

We took these and other photos and then went to Sue's house to help out and have some great spaghetti and salad. We are home now: I am blogging and editing photos, he is gaming. Early bed (before midnight!) tonight. Wingnut slept till after noon and I didn't get up until 7 AM. But it is Sunday and summer vacation. We finally had beautiful weather.

Animals seen today: three horses racing wild in a field (missed photo/video) and a turkey.
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How To Use the Histogram in iPhoto

Macworld: Secrets: iPhoto 5’s secret weapon

Ever wonder what that histogram thing was on your camera view finder and in your software? You can use it to take better photos and to edit your photos better. This article tells you what it's all about.

I had to post this before the Sunday Links because it was too important.

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Sunday Links

. . . a longer list than I had planned because I have saved these up for months

Miscellaneous:
Bill Moyers Journal Podcast
Billy Collins Live: A Performance At the Peter Norton Symphony Space, April 20, 2005
Dueling Anthologists At the 92nd Street Y (Billy Collins & Garrison Keillor)
Poetry 180
iGTD (Mac GTD software)
Los Angeles Times: Why do straights hate gays?
AIM Fight
eBizMBA: Popular Blogs
Visualizing Global Web Performance with Akamai

LOLCats:
The World Famous Random Kitten Generator
Slate: LOLCat Slideshow

The Iraq War:
Comey's Dissent at Justice
The Plague: Camus's Fable in Our Time
NY Times: The Line Between Torture and Cruelty
Howard Zinn: Impeachment by the People
Rolling Stone : Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

The Religion Wars:
The Phoenix: Holy War!
Open Source: Hitchins v God
Open Source: The Varieties of Faith and Reason, Take Two

And finally, because of the killing, traumatization and hate:



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I've Been Tagged: Eight Random Facts Meme

Dorothy tagged me for this meme. This meme will be a bit difficult because it's hard to think of eight new things about me. Also, it is hard to find eight new people!
So here we go . . .

8 Random Things About Me

The Rules

1. Each player states 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged write a blog post about their own 8 random things and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names.
4. Don't forget to leave them a comment and tell them they're tagged. Ask them to read your blog.
   

My Random Facts:

1. I play classical piano.
2. I want a Canon Rebel XTi camera (I feel I am Rebel-worthy now).
3. I am going to a Circus Smirkus performance on July 1 with Wingnut.
4. I want to go to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park in July with Wingnut.
5. My son Andrew is coming for a long visit over Labor Day!
6. I am a contributor to an algebra book (not a text)! Not as good as an author but my name is in print!
7. I can't wait to go birding again.
8. I only use Macintosh computers.

I Tag:

1. DaisyMae Maus
2. Lazy Daisy
3. Daisy the Curly Cat
4. Dragonheart
5. Biker Betty
6. jcfloresinc
7. Indiana Jane
8. Amy
   

Who Needs Spanning Sync Now?

Geek to Live: Sync Google Calendar and Gmail contacts to your desktop - Lifehacker

The biggest concern and disappointment I have had about the delay of Mac OS 10.5 is the weaknesses of my calendars. I have quite a few calendars: personal, professional, church, library, birthdays, mathematician birthdays, weather, Northeast Kingdom Events, and the Revised Common Lectionary. Trying to access them at work has been very difficult. I need to update and add events from work and have the updates sync at home on iCal. I could write scripts to do it but I don't have the time anymore. I cannot publish iCal to Mac servers because they do not publish private calendars like Google does. I don't want my calendars searched (and they were being searched); there is confidential information on them.

Then Spanning Sync came. I waited seemingly for ages until it reached public beta and then I grabbed it. It messed my calendars up quite a bit, but I accepted that. I could now add events to Google at work and it would update at home on iCal. When the beta ran out I had a choice of buying a $25 one-year subscription or a $65 one-time purchase. I decided to wait for OS 10.5 when I could expect all of my syncing and publishing needs to be available. But Apple delayed the release. I developed an attitude about buying Spanning Sync (for the privilege of having it mess up my life?) so I downloaded Google Desktop for Mac and my Google calendars are instantly available at home. I have trashed all of my iCal calendars.

Today I saw the link (above) in Digg for an open source project (free!) for syncing iCal and Google calendars. As soon as I am done gallavanting around on vacation this week I will install it.

GCalDaemon is a cross-platform, Java-based server that syncs your Google Calendar data locally and makes it available to applications like Sunbird (Thunderbird with Lightning), Rainlendar and iCal.

Apparently this app does way more than Spanning Sync. I will be more and more enmeshed with Google, which disturbs me for several reasons. But my calendars will now work smoothly and I will be happy about that. Nobody needs Spanning Sync now. I don't even need OS 10.5 ($129.00) anymore.

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Apple! Get Over It!

iPhone ain't worth this delayed release of OS 10.5. You can't choose your own carrier, and there is no service in the Northeast Kingdom. I won't even be allowed to buy one! Cingular can "get me in big trouble" (ooohhhhh I'm scared!) if I go to New Hampshire and smuggle the iPhone into Vermont. Is this corporate high-handedness or is this corporate high-handedness? I took that iPhone off my wishlist one week after it was announced.

From Apple – Hot News:

Apple Statement
iPhone has already passed several of its required certification tests and is on schedule to ship in late June as planned. We can’t wait until customers get their hands (and fingers) on it and experience what a revolutionary and magical product it is. However, iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price — we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we're sure we've made the right ones. [Apr 12, 2007]

The following quote is from an e-mail to me from an Apple retailer in Vermont in response to my question about iPhones not being available in Vermont (18Jan07):

If you have a cell phone and a local 802 # you can go to Boston or another place where Cingular sells service, get the iPhone and Cingular service and because of all the rollover laws keep your VT phone number...

Also Gov. Douglas has a plan to make more wireless and cell service available in VT so this may change.

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I KNEW I Was a Mac!

You Are a Mac

You are creative, stylish, and super trendy. You demand the best - even if it costs an arm and a leg.

Are You a Mac or a PC?

What's your 1950s Name?

Frances Marsha

The funny thing? My middle name (in English) is Frances! (It is actually Francoise.) And funnier? One of my two best friends in the whole world is Marcia (same pronunciation)!

YES, that is me. (I swapped out the images from this little thing and put my own in.)

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Photo Hunters: Soft

I can't explain why this is soft to me. But Mother-Daughter Night with the Women's Fellowship at church, held every April, is softness for me. Amelia and I have gone at least three times. She is my middle daughter and lives in Vermont. It's always a potluck supper and I fret for weeks about what we are going to bring (since I don't cook very well). But Amy always comes up with good and easy ideas that are the first dish to be finished.

Every woman got one of these tiny Beanie Baby type ducks on the first supper we went to. We had a Mary Kay party after the potluck. We were nearly on the floor laughing at each other with the things we were doing with the makeup! This duck has a special place in my heart. One day I will proudly have all three daughters at that dinner with me!

To make the image softer I used picnik (a free online photo editor) and GIMP. I don't know what I'm doing with either app, so I just kept clicking buttons until I had something I liked! I'm looking forward to seeing what other ideas people have for "soft"! Thank you for stopping by. Have a wonderful and peaceful week!

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Get a Mac Ad!

Spectators at the iPhone Display

Spectators at the iPhone Display, originally uploaded by duncandavidson.

THIS IS ON MY WISHLIST
I only want the biggest one.
Not the biggest you can afford: THE BIGGEST ONE.

Justification: when I am in a ditch on a snowy icy night in the far northern reaches of Vermont without any cell service, (see Barton Mountain Alliance) I will be able to watch movies, listen to my tunes and freeze in peace.

Check out http://www.iphonecountdown.com/iphone_readymech.pdf
and iPhone Count Down