iPhone
Friday, September 12th, 2008I got an iPhone. I’m so excited. I love being able to get online from wherever.
Archive for the ‘Macs’ Category
The Big Merge
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008Over the past few days, the husband and I have merged our music and our photos. Gasp! Combined we now have over 7000 images in our iPhoto library and our iTunes library ridiculously large. Unfortunately, he never really kept his music organized, so now there are a bunch of file with no album, track #, genre, etc. That frustrates me because I like having all that data in the music file. It makes it easier to create smart playlists for syncing to the iPod. So this weekend I will be spending some time trying to clean up all the music that he imported to my iTunes library.
We definitely have a variety of music styles in there from alternative to rock to country to jazz to kids music for Amelia. We even have some latin music and hip hop. And don’t forget all my podcasts, audiobooks and holiday music. There’s a lot in there that I have to weed through now.
Thankfully, merging the photo libraries was easy since he didn’t really use any of the “features” of iPhoto. I use keywords heavily and I give most photos titles. I use smart albums and create descriptions of the albums. All this makes it easy to keep track of what’s been exported to Amelia’s photo gallery. So importing his pictures was easy. Just exclude all duplicates and we’re good to go.
The only issue with merging iTunes, is that only one account can have iTunes open at a time (we’re storing the library in the /users/shared folder). So anytime we use it, we have to make sure we quit when we are done, so it doesn’t get locked in case the other person needs to get in.
I know what I’ll be working on this weekend. Organizing our music library. Fun times! Of course he’s out of town on his annual guy trip, so it’s just me and the baby for a few days. I’ll have plenty of quiet time after Amelia goes to bed to work on that between knitting and catching up on All My Children.
My Water Girl
Monday, June 9th, 2008We bought a small pool for Amelia this weekend. It’s big enough for the three of us to sit in so that’s nice. Amelia had a blast playing and splashing. She even laid down in the pool with her head just above the water. She did really well. She’s our little water girl. We had such an adventurous day on Saturday that she slept til 9am Sunday morning!! It was a nice morning of sleeping in for us. We went swimming again on Sunday and she went to bed 30 minutes earlier than usual. We definitely wore her out this weekend. But I know she had a great time.
In other news, sis and I got our tickets this morning to the New Kids on the Block concert. We’ll be in Atlanta Oct 29 for the big event. Woohoo!! I’m so excited!
We went to Birmingham this weekend as well and got my new iPod Touch. yeah! It’s awesome. I love it. I just wish I could get online more. I only have online access at home so far. We don’t have wireless at work and I haven’t yet tried taking it anywhere else in town to see what it will connect to. But so far I really like it. I had trouble with my user account though. iTunes wasn’t recognizing my iPhoto Library so I couldn’t sync pictures. I ended up having to create a new user account and move all my stuff over to the new account. That took forever to get it all moved over and working again. But I got it all fixed. I created 3 smart albums in iPhoto. One of them uses keyword Amelia, since I tag all of her photos with that keyword. Then I also added a date range of the last 3 months to it. So I can always have the latest 3 months worth of photos of Amelia on my iPod. The other 2 smart albums were similar except using keywords knitting and handspun. Even with all those photos and several new podcasts, I still had a bunch of disc space left. I’m not used to having 8GB of space. My Nano only has 4GB.
Tiring Weekend
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008We had a good weekend, but it was a bit tiring. We went to visit my sister in Atlanta. My parents were there too. For some reason, Amelia decided to be especially clingy to me the entire time, so it was very tiring.
But we bought a new 20" iMac and a Time Capsule to go with it. Pretty awesome. The best part was that my sister is officially a Mac user. She got her first Mac this weekend as well. Of course this means that she’ll be calling me for every little how to question. DH told her to ask her fiance, he switched a few months ago, so he’s somewhat familiar with Macs already.
We never made it to the movie, mainly because we just never found time for it. 
Isn’t that how it always is when you are visiting with family. It’s hard to get back into the swing of our routine after being away for a few days, but I’m sure we’ll settle back in pretty quickly.
Oh yeah. The hotel we stayed at was having a TimeGate convention going on…sci-fi convention for fans of Dr. Who and Stargate. The actor who plays Master Bra’tac was there. I missed him, but my husband saw him when we were checking in. People were dressed up in costume and one night, my husband got a photo of someone dressed up in a Storm Trooper outfit drinking a beer. 
There was also a Delorean parked outside the hotel. Pretty wild!
Time Machine
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007The one feature of Leopard that I look forward to the most is Time Machine. Now that I’m taking a zillion pictures of Amelia I really want to make sure I don’t lose any of them. And Leopard is making this easier with it’s new built in backup system.
Browsing the web today I found a really good, in-depth article explaining just how Time Machine works. After reading this article, it only makes me want to upgrade to Leopard that much sooner and get my backup system in place. Especially since the new iPhoto (iLife ’08) keeps all the photos and the photo library database in one package rather than in a folder structure like the previous versions do. You can no longer just back up the iPhoto Library folder. So having Time Machine back that up for me will be a lifesaver.
Leopard is Here…but I Must Wait
Friday, October 26th, 2007Apple is releasing the new Mac OSX today. Leopard will be available for purchase as of 6pm CST this evening. And I don’t have it. I haven’t ordered it and I doubt I will be ordering it at least for another month or two. Why, you ask? Because I don’t have the money. It’s the same reason I haven’t yet ordered my copy of iLife ’08. Lack of funds. It totally sucks because I’ve been looking forward to it since the first announcement last year sometime.
We’ll be getting the family pack seeing as how we have 3 Macs currently running at home. The desktop will get a full clean install of the new OS and all needed applications. It’s way overdue. The laptop, being that it’s pretty new (I’ve only had it since June), will most likely just get an upgrade after some clean up and a full backup, of course. Thankfully I have a large external HD that is perfect for that.
I think the features I’m most looking forward to is Time Machine and Stacks. I currently have a cluttered desktop with all the downloads that I haven’t cataloged yet. It will be nice to get those off my computer and into someplace that’s easily accessible. Time Machine is essential with all the gazillion of pictures I take of Amelia that I need to preserve. And I love that I’ll be able to use the same external HD for both the desktop and laptop.
And with all the knitting patterns I’ve collected in PDF format, the Quick Look feature will come in handy when I want to look inside a particular pattern. Heck it will even be great for scanning my digital layouts.
So hurry up Christmas and get here fast. I have a feeling that’s when I’ll finally be able to upgrade. Unless we just take the plunge and use the trusty old credit card, which we keep vowing not to ever use again except in an emergency. Can I consider this an emergency?
