No PDA for the PDA

Apartment Therapy has a article on replacing your PDA with a paper planner… Now here is a novel idea. One that I have considered for a long time but have been to scared to do. Actually replace my buggy, digitizer orientation challenged Palm Tungsten T2 and go back to using a nice, portable paper planner. When I think about the things that I honestly use my Palm for, many of them would be just as easy on a piece of paper in a well bound and pocket sized journal. To Do’s and other list type items for instance, which I more often write in the “note pad” of the Palm just like a paper entry anyway.

I am especially fond of the Moleskine Ruled Pocket Journal which I recently purchased. Problem is, I still have not really used it because I have not “made” a use for it. Perhaps, if I were to rid myself of the broken crutch that is my Palm I would.

Monday Mac Tweak #4

Post Subtitle: “The Moral of The Story or Back That Thang Up”

One thing was made abundantly clear to me after the hard drive adventure I experienced this weekend. There is absolutely NO EXCUSE for someone like me, who uses and supports technology for a living, to not have a recent backup. Especially since there are so many cheap and/or free backup utilities. Here are the ones I like (none of them begin with “R” or end with “etrospect”)

RsyncX– rsync is actually a synchronization utility that already exists, for free, and is built into the Unix underpinnings of Mac OS X. The problem is that it is a Unix utility and does not play well with Mac resource forks. That being said, there is a way to use this tool.RsyncX, developed by Kevin Boyd, is a free version of this utility for Mac OS X that does play nice with the Mac. It also provides a graphical front end to the utility for those who are “Terminally Impaired”. Matthew Phillips has written and excellent resource called “Backup Your Mac With rsync” that is worth checking out if you wish to do this.

The Caveat: You can’t use this utility to back up to CD-R or DVD-R media. It works great with external drives including Firewire, USB

Deja Vu – For making scheduled backups to all manner of media, including CD-R and DVD, you can’t go wrong with Deja Vu. It is not only effective but, at $24.95, it is not that expensive either. Deja Vu lives as a preference pane in your System Preferences so it unobtrusive. It can be set to do manual backups as well.

Backup – If you have a .Mac account then you already have a “free” backup program available to you called, curiously enough, Backup. Backup allows you to back up to external hard drives, CD-R, DVD or even your .Mac iDisk. It is actually a very well designed piece of software. It allows for scheduled backups or manual ones, has a Quick Picks feature that will automatically back up things like “All Microsoft Word files in my home folder”, and much, much more.

Hard Drive Blues

Sorry for the delay in this week’s Mac Tweak. After 3 years of faithful service, the hard drive of my Powerbook G4 12 inch (867) decided to take a “hard dive”. Bethany and I came home from a wonderful breakfast at the Neighborhood Café to find my beloved laptop making a noise similar to a blender. Needless to say, I was in a panic. First off, I couldn’t afford to buy a Mac mini let alone a Powerbook. To make matters worse, The last backup I had was 2 months old. Two months! That is a century in the life of someone like me who uses his computer all day, everyday, for almost everything. It was a disaster.

To make a long story short, thanks to the beauty and generosity of Bethany I now have a new Powerbook G4 12 inch. A machine that will once again serve me for years to come.