My First Experience with OS X Lion!

Hi!

I've Tweeted quite a bit today about my first hands-on experience with OS X Lion.  Some of what I've learned may be helpful to others working with Lion for the first time. Check out my Tweets at:

    https://twitter.com/brianlevine

Enjoy!

--Brian

My 8 GB of Happiness!

It doesn't take much, folks.

On Sunday afternoon I ordered an 8 GB memory kit for my MacBook (unibody, 13-inch, late 2009) from Ramjet.  It arrived Tuesday afternoon. A half hour later, I had it installed.  8 GB bliss!  That's pretty quick gratification.

This upgrade doubled my MacBook memory from 4 GB to 8 GB.  It also enabled me to increase my Win7 VirtualBox VM from 1 GB to 2 GB.  And what a difference in performance this makes!  Personally, I wouldn't buy another Mac without at least 8 GB of RAM.  Of course, YMMV.

Now I've got plenty of space to run my Win7 and Ubuntu VMs alongside all my regular native Mac OS X programs, but without all that nasty paging to hard disk.  Sweet!

The price of this particular upgrade was great, too.  It was around $150 plus shipping and tax.  I don't recall the price being anywhere near this good the last time I checked.

Kudos to Apple and to iFixit for making this upgrade so painless!  In addition to the memory modules themselves, all I had to deal with were eight screws, three clips, and a battery connector.  I didn't even strip any screws in the process!

Interestingly, I experienced some difficulty on the first boot after the upgrade.  The MacBook had apparently forgotten its date and time and such.  I was surprised.  Normally, CMOS batteries maintain these settings.  Perhaps these newer MacBooks with non user replaceable batteries don't have CMOS batteries?  In any case, resetting the PRAM and NVRAM and then connecting to the network fixed this up.

I'm a happy camper right now.  *smile*

--Bri

Monitoring CrashPlan Backup in Real Time on the Mac OS X Desktop!

Hi,

In recent weeks, I've taken to using CrashPlan+ for personal online backups.  I'll write more on CrashPlan proper at another time.  For now, I'd like to share a nice little method I've got for monitoring CrashPlan activity in real time on my Mac OS X Desktop.  Folks in the CrashPlan User Forums have been asking developers to add such functionality to the native CrashPlan client.  But for Mac OS X users, at least, there's no need to wait!

It's done very simply with the free and awesome GeekTool.  Check out a couple of screenshots.

This first is of my Desktop.  Note the CrashPlan History Log data:

The second is of my Desktop with the GeekTool System Preference Pane open to the configuration section for the CrashPlan History Log file:

My Mac has a standard CrashPlan install.  The History Log file is at:

    /Library/Logs/CrashPlan/history.log.0

GeekTool updates the log file display continuously.  I press F11 (Exposé Desktop) to glance at my logs unobstructed by other windows. Afterwards, I press F11 again to resume what I was working on beforehand.  What could be simpler?

While I haven't tried it yet, similar monitoring can probably be done on Linux Desktops with the free and open source Conky.

I don't know how this might be done on Microsoft Windows Desktops.

So why don't you give this a try on your Mac OS X machine with CrashPlan and let me know how it works out?

--Brian