You call this a vacation? Part II

Why did I make a point of mentioning Picasa and the Windows machine? Because this is a two operating system house and the iBook was busy rendering and burning all day long. In between doing everything I wrote about, I also learned how to use iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD to produce a DVD with the Peter Pan show and a slideshow of related stills. I also added music, menus and scrolling stills to the menus. Then I burned the whole thing to a DVD.

While I was at it, the hard drive was looking awfully full and needed some deferred maintenance. I surfed around to learn about Mac maintenance. I hooked up the external FireWire drive and backed up my /Users/Grace area. I couldn't figure out how to do it with OS X so I resorted to Unix. I started a Terminal session and did a

> cp -R /Users/Grace /Volumes/BackupDrive/Grace/YYYYMMDD

If anyone knows a better way to do this, please leave a comment.

I downloaded and ran MacJanitor. (If you turn your Mac off or put it to sleep between 3 and 5 AM, as any energy-conscious person would do, then your computer is not running OS X's system housekeeping chron jobs.) Running MacJanitor, which invokes the OS X housekeeping scripts, and emptying the Trash in several applications saved me a couple of gigabytes. If only I did that before the backup!

Anyhow, this has taken me the better part of Sunday and Monday. I have burned 2 DVDs and have 2 more to go.

I do love running iLife and Unix on the same machine. I was never super comfortable with the Windows environment and the way it hid "dll" files promiscuously in secret places. Partisans would say that Apple has the upper hand there. But, ask them to show you the location of the real /etc/passwd file. If you know the answer, please leave a comment because my local OS X guru and I desperately want to know.

You call this a vacation? Part I
More musings about Technology and my conversion to a Mac.