All Forces

12 years ago I acquired this old Macintosh from Otis, the Art School I was attending to at the time. I used to work part time at the computer lab there and this little machine was sitting in a closet collecting dust until I asked to take it home. Since then I have never been able to use it for lack of an Operating System. It turns out, the OS, the applications and it’s documents all get saved to 400k floppies, something virtually impossible to find nowadays. And I was never really sure what model exactly this computer was since it just says Macintosh on it. I eventually gave up on the quest of finding floppies and the Mac was stored away in a closet. Going from apartment to apartment and finally to our current home’s garage. Last week I decided, after many years of retirement, it was time to open it up and see if I can pull a Serang by replacing the innards with that of an iMac SE and a flat display from an IBM ThinkPad.

To my surprise I found all these signatures inside the box and realized this was no ordinary vintage Mac, this was model M0001, the very first Macintosh model ever built. So now I have a dilemma, do I continue the original plan of hacking it? or do i restore it back to it’s 128k glory?

NOTE ADDED: When I say the very first Mac model I am saying the first generation of the Mac not the very first individual unit.

Got LOTS of pictures!
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The default interface for Mail signatures allows you to do rich text signatures using the fonts and colors palette. You can even drag an image into the compose signature window and it will be included in every email as an attachment. This is fine for most people, but attachments should be just that, an attachment of a file I am sending, not an image in my signature. So here’s an easy guide on how to do CSS signatures referencing images on an outside server and not as an attachment.
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What is Portable Apps? They are applications that save their data in the drive they reside in, not in the host computer they are running in. This mean I can run Firefox from my iPod and all of it’s preferences, bookmarks, history and extensions will stay on my iPod and not in my computer. This allows me to run my app in any computer without leaving any of this info on the actual computer. Freesmug has a small list of open source apps, but it covers the basics (browser, email, ftp, cha,t etc). It has been rumored for a while that Apple is working on a iPod portable home folder but nothing has been released yet from Cupertino. But in the meantime, there’s Freesmug.

Link: freesmug.org/portableapps

My Powerbook has been lagging for a while now. Mostly due to the fact that my 100 GB drive is down to 1 GB of available space. I started the process of archiving to my external drive some projects I was done with and I was able to bring it up to 15.3 GB. I then remembered reading about an application that strips all extra languages that come with Mac OS X and all it’s applications. The worst thing that can happen is that I have to reinstall the OS, no big deal. I gave Monolingual a try and was highly impressed. Not only does it strip superfluous languages (warning: make sure u don’t remove english and us english, they are two separate options) I would never need but it also removes architecture specific parts of apps like the code for the new intel macs. These new universal applications include the application for both the powerpc and intel architecture but this is precious space I want back for my ever expanding 50 GB iTunes library, my 20 GB iPhoto library and oh yes, my work, I forgot that’s why I originally got the computer for.

I shaved off 2 gigs of languages and intel code.

Link: monolingual.sourceforge.net

I know this is going to be all over the mac news sites but it is just too big not to mention it. Apple has released a beta of a new app called Boot Camp that allows a user to run Windows natively on the mac. This is with Apple’s blessing of course. Boot Camp partitions your drive and installs all drivers necessary to run Windows, but you need your own copy of course. My friend Chad is hoping they offer the reverse as well so that he can run Mac OS X on his Thinkpad but I think we got to draw the line somewhere right?

Link: apple.com
Link: Joy of Tech

This is my latest Apple Swag, a nice black t-shirt with grey words that say ‘I visited the Mothership’, courtesy of my friend George Ariola. Previously he was product manager of Adobe GoLive but now is a technologist at Apple. He was in town last week and we met at the jewish deli and L.A. landmark Canters to catch up on our lives. Apparently this t-shirt is only available at the store in the Apple campus in Cupertino. Thank you George, you rock! The t-shirt has a small white Apple logo on the back and for those of you wondering, I have been to the Mothership so it’s not false advertising.

Most people I know don’t know that iPhoto can be tagged with keywords. Or if they do they don’t know how to use them. They’re not to blame, iPhoto has always had an awkward implementation of keywords. iPhoto 06 improves on keywords but they are still confusing to most users I know. So here’s a quick tutorial on setting up and managing keywords in iPhoto. This tutorial uses iPhoto 06, but it can be implemented in earlier versions that support keywords.

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I am as addicted to menubar items on my Mac as I am to my morning Latte. And the best place for finding such wonderful compact applications is the super OS X menubar items page. They are categorized, have a description, cost and fancy icon. There was a time where it seemed the project was being abandoned, but it’s been recently updated with the latest and greatest goodies. Long live these tiny wonders!

Link: menu.jeweledplatypus.org