Scottie’s Blog

Simple eMac combo drive replacement0
scottie posted in Uncategorized on February 14th, 2006

To make a long story short remember that if you have AppleCare coverage on a machine, take it into an Apple repair shop and let them do the work. One of the eMacs in my office had a Symantec issue which led us to transfer this particular user from one eMac to another. After transferring all the users data to this new machine I went to install Quark 6.0. I came to realize that the combo drive in the machine was not reading the disk and needed to be replaced. It’s at this point that there was a let down in the decision making process. I decided to crack open the eMac and take the drive out myself. 45 minutes later I did in fact get the drive out and was left with a mess of screws, computer guts and a wonderful eMac shell that can double as a helmet.

The good news is that I did in fact get the drive out of the machine and I did receive the replacement part back today. Tomorrow will be a fun experiment to see if I can assemble the eMac again and not have any screws left. To be continued…

My mention on the Podcast “The Mac Attack”0
scottie posted in Uncategorized on February 8th, 2006

As many of you know I am an avid Podcast listener. I have upwards of 10 Podcasts that I subscribe to through iTunes. I recently heard of a Podcast named The Mac Attack after listening to Adam’s Podcast over the The Mac Cast. After listening to an earlier edition of The Mac Attack I sent in an email comment concerning online collaboration tools. I recommended that they check out Collabits which is a web-based, cross platform collaboration solution. Not only did The Mac Attack read the email I sent them but they spent several minutes discussing Collabits. Head on over to The Mac Attack and check out the latest Podcast dated 2/8/06 to hear the review. If you want to skip ahead to the Collabits part start at the 17th minute.

30 Boxes0
scottie posted in Uncategorized on February 7th, 2006

There is a wonderful new calendaring program out in beta called 30boxes. I originally heard of this product from a blog post by Patrick on the geekgather.org blog site. I have been playing with it now for about 2 hours and I am impressed so far. This calendar makes it easy to share your calendar with “buddies” and have them share there calendar with you. I can see my wife and I using this service to keep our busy schedules straight. You can bring other services into 30 boxes such as your flickr account or a myspace account if you choose. You can also subscribe to the calendar in iCal on Mac OS X if you use that program. I highly recommend signing up for an account and trying out this service for yourself. It is a lot of fun!

Apple’s 1984 Ad Voted 3rd All-Time by CBS Viewers0
scottie posted in Uncategorized on February 5th, 2006

CBS just aired “Super Bowls Greatest Commercials Top 40″ this evening and Apple’s 1984 ad took 3rd place as voted on by the viewers.

My favorite Super Bowl ad out of the top 3 has to be “Terry Tate, the office linebacker”, man that was funny.

I also just discovered that after their 14th attempt, godaddy.com finally got approved by ABC to run a Super Bowl ad. You can read that story here.

Sidenote Review0
scottie posted in apps on February 4th, 2006

I’m sure we all have our apps that we use everyday. For some it might be MS Word and for others it may be Photoshop. For me the one app I use on a daily basis is sidenote. I discovered this app while reading a copy MacWorld magazine a while back. This is a wonderful application which acts as an easy way to capture notes is a side drawer type interface. You can set sidenote up anywhere on the left or right of your screen. When you move your cursor over to that spot on the edge of your screen, sidenote slides out. It has a very easy Mac-like interface with simple buttons on the top to add new notes, save notes and edit fonts and styles. You can color the background of the note, print it or export it to rich text to open in a word processor.