Here at Corpmac we’re fans of virtualisation - both Parallels in particular is in pretty much daily use. However, there are times where nothing other than Boot Camp will do the trick - so we also have a slice of hard disk dedicated to a Boot Camp partition.

Trouble is, its size was a bit of a guess. And, it turns out, quite a bit too large. Getting that wasted disk space back to the main Mac partition isn’t something that can be done with Boot Camp Assistant - well, not unless you want to do a complete backup / resize / restore. Not a pleasant task.

So, we’re glad to find out about CampTune from Paragon Software. This is a bootable CD that enables you to safely resize partitions, automatically dealing with any data that needs moved to cope with the resizing.

We’ve given this a work-out here - eventually settling on reclaiming the 7Gb we had over-allocated to out Boot Camp partition. CampTune performed perfectly each time, taking around an hour to move data and resize the partitions. The only small niggle we’d have is that once it’s finished, and you press OK, it just leaves you sitting at a final screen. All you need to do (and indeed can do) at this point is reboot, but it’d be good to have at least a message on screen telling you to do this.

So definitely recommended if you want to resize your Boot Camp partition. CampTune does exactly that with no fuss or drama.

CampTune is in pre-release at the moment, and is currently available for free.

Technorati Tags:
CampTune, partition, Boot Camp

Posted: August 10th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

These little wireless broadband adaptors are very common in the UK right now. Several of the mobile phone carriers - Three and Vodaphone at least - use them. The trouble is, the supplied application crashes out under the current Leopard build, 10.5.3, when trying to make a connection.

There is a trick to get it working, though. Do the following:

Firstly, run the “Mobile Connect” Make sure under “settings” there is a profile: I called mine “3 USB Modem”, with Access Point name of 3internet and Telephone number of *99#. You only need to do this once.

Secondly, go into System Preferences. In the Network pane, select the HUAWEI mobile device in the left pane. Now, in the right pane, under Configuration, select “Add Configuration”. I caled mine “Three”. Add *99# as the telephone number, make sure “Show modem status in menu bar” is ticked (for convenience) and you’re all set.

Each time you need to make a connection, firstly run the mobile connect application from the usb modem key. I don’t get reliable connections unless I do this. Then go to your menu bar, locate the little phone icon, and choose “Connect HUAWEI mobile.”

That’s it. That will make a connection to your wireless broadband service provider.

Huawei have recognised the problem and are expected to bring out a replacement application soon, but this will keep you working until they do so. I’d keep an eye on their forums for the announcement of the new app.

Technorati Tags:
leopard, Huawei, E169G, 10.5.3

Posted: June 20th, 2008 under Stuff We Use, Tips.
Comments: none

An article in MacWorld today goes into a really clumsy way of counting words in Pages documents. It surprises us that Pages doesn’t have better word-counting capabilities, but there’s a much better solution than the one in that article.

A freeware service called WordService, from Devon Technologies, installs (amongst other things) a “Statistics” item onto the Services menu, available halfway down the application menu. Select some text, choose Statistics, and you’ll get a word count for the selected block. Simple!

WordService is available from Devon Technologies’ freeware services web page.

Technorati Tags:
wordservice, macworld

Posted: February 9th, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

I’ve had one spam today. That’s a 99.5% reduction. I’m impressed. The system is a pretty serious pain in the neck to set up for small users: once you understand their model then it’s fine, but it’s not one for unsophisticated admins to set up.

A full review will appear later, but if the per-user costs of Google Apps Message Security Services gives you cause for concern, Mail-scanning.com, a uk-based service propose to charge by the domain. Their prices are not yet fixed (as they’re in free beta) but they are looking to charge around £10 or less per domain per year. That’s good value.

Technorati Tags:
antispam, antivirus, google, postini, mail-scanning

Posted: February 7th, 2008 under News, Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

The thing I like most about SuperDuper from Shirt Pocket Software is that it just works. That’s the reason for the 3.5 month delay between Leopard’s release and the release of the new version yesterday - the guys wanted to be absolutely certain that it continued to do so. And it definitely does.

The way it’s most used here is to make full images of machines’ system drives, updated nightly. This way, if an internal hard drive fails (our Macbook Pros have been pretty heavily thrown about when travelling in the past, and we have had drive failures) all we need to do is get a new drive, install it, then restore directly from the SuperDuper drive. Best of all, we can continue to use the machine - albeit slowly - booted off the external drive.

We’ve been trying that today, and are pleased to report that it all works perfectly for us. There was only one small problem - SuperDuper uses a series of scripts to exclude certain files from the backup. We extended that with our own script, to exclude other thing we didn’t care whether they were backed up or not. One script has vanished - the “Exclude Spotlight Search Index” script - and this caused our backups to fail to start until we modified them to remove this script. After that it’s been fine.

We’re breathing a sigh of relief here. We have our bootable backups back. While we don’t mistreat our machines, accidents can and do happen. Now the process of recovering from such an accident is simple again.

SuperDuper 3.5 is a free upgrade for existing users, and $27.95 to unlock full functionality for new users. Feature-limited demos are free.

Technorati Tags:
SuperDuper, review

Posted: February 6th, 2008 under Review, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

Our Mac Backup toolkit is full again - we’ve been users of Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper for a long as we’ve been using Macs recently, and it’s the thing we’ve missed most whilst using Leopard. There’s nothing quite as good as knowing you have a bootable image of your Mac’s hard disk lying around in case of emergency.

The update has been a while coming, but the guys at Shirt Pocket are perfectionists. However, it’s been released today and it’s a free upgrade to existing users, $27.95 to new users.

Technorati Tags:
software, SuperDuper

Posted: February 5th, 2008 under News, Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

We’re inveterate downloaders here - it comes with what we do. Documents are read, software is tried, invoices are received (often for the just-mentioned software). All of this creates a pretty extensive clutter in our download folder. And there’s more than that. We’re creating documents almost as quickly. All of this leads to several heaps of stuff that really need some organisation.

Don’t get us wrong - we often do just fine with Quick Look for identification, or Spotlight to find things, but it’s always good to be able to find something manually. Which still means a well-organised file system.

This is where Hazel, from Noodlesoft, comes in. It automatically performs actions of your choice to items in folders you specify. For example, things appearing in my downloads folder are automatically sorted into disk images and zips, pdfs, and other. Videos and music are automatically moved into the correct directories.

This program saves me endless rummaging around on my disk to find where I’ve put stuff, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Well worth the $24.95 registration fee.

Technorati Tags:
OSX, organization, Hazel, software

Posted: January 7th, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
Comments: none

We’re sold on the iPhone here as a business device. Sure, it’s not as flexible as we hoped, but it’s a rev. 1 product, and it’s still the easiest way to keep in contact via email, SMS and for actual calling.

However, there are aspects of its functions that are distinctly limited. There’s no way of backing up information like call logs or SMSes. And the Notepad application is completely brain-dead.

While I’m hoping that Apple will answer these problems in due course (synching the Notepad to a Notes folder in Leopard would make me very happy,) Mark/Space have gone and got there first. They’ve released Missing Sync for iPhone which answers all the problems described above.

We’ve not played around with it much, so will hold off on the full review for a little later.

And best of all? If you’re an iPhone convert and have used Missing Sync for another device in the past? You’ll get this version for $24.95 instead of $39.95. That’s a bargain.

Technorati Tags:
missing sync, iphone

Posted: January 2nd, 2008 under Stuff We Use.
Comments: none