Mokka mit Schlag » Mac

It took a quick trip to the hardware store in the rain to locate a Torx T-8 screwdriver, but my MacBook now has more than double the disk space it started with:

The hard drive is the new Western Digital 640GB 5400RPM Scorpio Blue. Western Digital makes make a couple of even more capacious 2.5in drives, but those are a few millimeters too thick to fit in the MacBook. It’s a little noisy, but I think that’s just because Time Machine is doing a complete backup of it. It should quiet down once Time Machine is done.

Possibly I should have gone with a 7200RPM 500GB drive instead, but the extra space was too tempting. Or I could have gone with a wicked fast SSD drive, but that would have traded space for speed. I used SuperDuper and an AcomData USB enclosure to copy the old hard drive to the new one before swapping them around. That seems to have worked reasonably well so far. Firefox gotten a little confused trying to restore its sessions, but that’s minor.

Now I can get serious about combining my Windows apps onto this one laptop, using either Parallels or VMWare Fusion. I’ve actually been spending more time in Windows lately for two critical apps: Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Aion.

Both Parallels and VMWare say they’ll import my existing PC onto the Mac, but I’m not sure that will work since Dell cheaped out and installed an OEM edition of Windows Vista instead of the full version. I’ve got full install discs of Windows 2000 around here somewhere, but I’m not sure that will run all the software I want. Anyone know the cheapest way to get a copy of Windows (XP or later) for the Mac?

I just noticed this in my logs:

9/13/09 8:12:01 PM com.apple.launchd.peruser.501[4485] (com.epson.epw.agent[6796]) posix_spawn(“/Library/Printers/EPSON/InkjetPrinter/EPW/IJEPWAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/IJEPWAgent”, …): No such file or directory

What’s really annoying is that it happens every 10 seconds. Anyone know how to turn off whatever is trying to do this? I don’t have any Epson equipment.
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Snow Leopard’s broken some of my AppleScripts in some weird way I don’t yet understand. After some debugging the problem seems to lie in files. Specifically files treated as strings. This no longer works:

set libraryFile to file "Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt"

Nor does this:

set libraryFile to alias "Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt"

They both die with

error “File alias Macintosh HD:Users:elharo:Cafe Au Lait:support:CafeLib.scpt of «script» wasn’t found.” number -43

Any ideas?
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I have almost completely switched over to Safari of Firefox, and have found replacements for almost all my Firefox plugins; but the lack of seamless keyword search in the location bar still bugs the hell out of me, enough to make me switch back to Firefox on occasion just for that. However recently I installed Verizon FIOS and noticed that Verizon’s DNS services intercept failing DNS queries through the browser and replace it with Yahoo search results. This means I can now type “fred brooks” into the location bar, and get a link to the page I need.

Well, almost. There are two problems:
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If LIghtroom were open source, there’d be a bug tracker somewhere:

It took some time and a learning curve, but I am now more or less happily using Adobe Lightroom 2.4 to manage my more serious DSLR nature photography. (I still use iPhoto for point-and-shoot family photos and the like.) Lightroom’s ability to correct exposure problems is nothing short of magic, and has rescued many photos. Here are some updates on things I’ve talked about in the past, as well as some open questions.
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