These are my links for June 9th:

• MacFixIt – Tutorial: Mac OS X Location Finder: Part 1 – An excellent article about where to find things in the file system in Mac OS X

These are my links for June 8th:

• AFP548 – Combining DHCP and DNS –

Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies has written some pretty amazing stuff, and this is another shining example. I gather that Half a Heart is about a man (or woman I guess) who has somehow cheated on his/her significant other and realized what a horrible thing that was to do. There is some speculation that this one is perhaps autobiographical, at least partially.

The song was recorded for their latest album, Barenaked Ladies are Me (Deluxe Edition) or the Barenaked Ladies are Men album. I also really enjoy this version that Ed has recorded as part of the Bathroom Sessions, which is Ed sitting in his bathroom, doing a solo, acoustic version of the song, while recording it with the built-in iSight camera on his MacBook Pro.

Half A Heart

Drunk on wine, I’m amazing
Bitter pill; it’s my raising
News at five and at midnight
Caught on tape; serves me right
The crowd around me starts to grow
I can feel the undertow

Anyone with half a heart would help me out
Before they ever let the other half find out
But if they could see how far I’ve let you down
Anyone with half a heart would let me drown

These are my links for June 5th:

• Valuable Lessons on Simplicity — from Trash | zen habits –
• 50 Ways to Be Romantic on the Cheap | zen habits –
• Zen Mind: How to Declutter | zen habits – Decluttering
• How to Never Lose a Thing Again | zen habits – This article is something I need to read, re-read, re-read, and then live by.
• Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Easily create lots of new folders – A cool tip about creating folders from the command line.

My wife and I made a trip to Iowa this past weekend to see her Grandmother. On the way back, we drove through a line of thunderstorms and after we had passed through, we looked back and saw an incredible rainbow. We pulled off the road in the closest, convenient spot, and I managed to snap this photo of the rainbow ending right over a horse grazing in the pasture. Pretty cool, huh?

–Pete

These are my links for June 4th:

• Xserve: Unexpected reboot causes –

It is that time of the year again. What time is that? Llama shearing time. We have two llamas, and man were they looking shaggy! Neither my wife or I have had any experience with shearing the wool from a llama, but we knew it had to be done, as they were both sporting a long coat. It turns out that there is a woman who lives not too far from our house that has five llamas of her own, as well as the appropriate equipment needed to shear the llamas. We hired her. Now we have two very bald llamas, that look absolutely ridiculous. What do you do with a freshly shorn llama? You bring them to your suburban house and show them to the neighbors, right? At least, that’s what we decided to do. I’m pretty sure our neighbors think we’re nuts, but they did enjoy seeing the llamas, despite the fact they are so funny looking right now.

The photo above was taken in the front yard of our house. Doesn’t Catazo look like his head is on a stick? The photo below shows what he looked like before he got shaved. You might also enjoy this before picture of Catazo compared to what he looked like after being shaved.

–Pete

These are my links for May 29th:

• F-Script Home – This is apparently a scripting language that is open source and you can use to talk to the Cocoa layer of Mac OS X. I need to look at this more closely

We had planned to spend a nice, restful weekend out at the farm this past holiday weekend. We did end up doing that, but it didn’t start the way we expected. As we were getting ready to hit the road, my wife ran downstairs to check on the rabbit and guinea pig one more time and to top off their food and water since we wouldn’t be home for a couple of days. She noticed that Cinnamon, the guinea pig, hadn’t touch his food from the previous night, which was odd, since he was always a good eater. She peered into his cage and he look fine, but she decided to pick him and looked right as his cute little face and then gasped in horror. His left eye was literally bulging clear out of the socket. It was right out of a horror film gross. I’m not kidding. I thought for sure we would be saying goodbye to our beloved little pig.

Fortunately, our good friend Brek, who is also our vet, was working a fill-in vet for a clinic nearby our house on Saturday. She gave him a call and he said, “Bring him right in.” Brek looked him over and was astounded at the eye. He’d never seen one that bad. Apparently, rodents are peculiar in the reactions to eye injuries. If they injure an eye, even with something as simple as a scratch, their immune systems can kick into overdrive and cause their bodies to literally reject the eye, which is his theory as to what happened to Cinnamon. After his exam, his initial reaction was not what we wanted to hear — he didn’t think there was anything we could do and that we should consider putting him down. After a few minutes of thinking about it though, he changed his mind. He said, “Actually, there is one thing I could do. If this were to happen to a dog or cat, I’d surgical remove the injured eye, sew the eyelid shut, and then treat for infection. I’ve never done that type of surgery to a guinea pig, but the surgery is relatively straight forward. We could try that on Cinnamon if you are willing to let me try.” We thought about and decided to go ahead. An hour later, we had a one-eyed guinea pig.

So far, the recovery seems to be going pretty well. My wife has been giving him pain medicine twice a day and oral antibiotics. His little face is swollen, but even that seems better tonight. He’s eating again too. I guess time will tell, but I have much higher hopes that the little guy will pull through. Who’d thought?

If he survives, we’ll be making him a little pirate’s eye patch for him to wear on Halloween. Don’t you think that’s a good idea? Keep the little guy in your prayers.

–Pete

This photo is of our horse Sioux. I loved the way this picture turned out because the lighting really highlighted the dappling of her coat. I’ll be taking some more photos of her this weekend.

These are my links for May 25th:

• MacUser: How to make a stronger password (or how to not get Linkin Parked) –

If you have been living under a rock, you might not know that Leo Laporte is the head of the very popular TWiT podcast network. TWiT has a bunch of podcasts that I enjoy listening to, including the flagship This Week in Tech, The Daily Gizwiz, MacBreak Weekly, and Security Now, to name a few.
Why am I bringing this up now? Simple. I was driving home from Warroad, MN today (yeah — that’s about a 7.5 hour drive for those of you playing at home) and ended up going through the little town of Laporte, MN. I actually had my new camera with me, so I couldn’t resist snapping a few photos. I sent an email to Leo along with a link to the photos. I know he gets absolutely flooded with emails, so I’m not expecting him to respond to the email, but it would be kinda cool.

Have any of you been through Laporte, MN?

–Pete

These are my links for May 23rd:

• Boot Camp Beta: Apple keyboards and keyboard mapping in Windows XP – An incredibly detailed article about how the keyboard mappings work with BootCamp 1.2 for Intel Macs.
• 10 Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Stupid – The title speaks for itself.
• Video Slideshows with Aperture and Final Cut Pro – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog – This article mentions an Aperture plugin to send slideshows to Final Cut Pro.

These are my links for May 22nd:

• MacBook, MacBook Pro: Noises from the optical drive – I love the fact that this article includes sound samples of the noises that the optical drive makes.
• MacDevCenter.com — Top Ten Mac OS X Tips for Unix Geeks – The title of this article speaks for itself.

In my job, I often get asked, “How much memory should I get for my Mac?”. To answer that question, you have to understand how you use your Mac. One great way to figure that out, if you currently use a Mac, is to take a look at the Activity Monitor application, which is in your Utilities Folder. Activity Monitor will tell you all kinds of useful things, including how much memory each application and each process is taking to run, and how much free memory is left. Apple has produced a really nice Knowledgebase Article that explains how to interpret the memory information you see in Activity Monitor. You should stop everything and read it now. Here’s the link:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

By the way, have you noticed that when I run across interesting Apple Knowledgebase Articles, I bookmark them with del.icio.us? You can see my collection of bookmarked kbase articles by visiting this URL:

http://del.icio.us/pmarkham/applekbase

–Pete

And here is the first Photo of the Week post. This photo is Smokey the Cat. She is one of the barn cats that lives out at the farm. The photo was taken while we were all hanging out in the backyard at the farm, enjoying the nice weather of a Saturday afternoon.

–Pete

When I was in high school, I used to work for the Camera and Electronics department of a store called BEST. (For more information on BEST, check out this wikipedia article.) Many of the folks that worked in the Camera and Electronics department were amateur photographers and it was while I worked there that I learned about photography from them. It was also while I worked there that I bought my first SLR camera, a Minolta X-700. I took thousands of photos with my X-700 and thoroughly enjoyed learning about photography with that camera. It went all over the U.S. with me and several of the photos in my gallery were taken with that camera (and scanned later of course!). About five years ago, the shutter mechanism in the X-700 finally died and I decided it was time to upgrade to an auto-focus SLR. I traded in the equipment I had and bought a Minolta Maxuum HTsi with a couple of nice lenses. I enjoyed that camera as well, but I quickly lost interest as digital cameras became affordable. I loved that fact that digital cameras were instant gratification — I didn’t have to wait to see how my pictures turned out. Unfortunately, digital SLR cameras, at that time, were still sky-high in prices, so I lived with a digital point and shoot. Two weeks ago I made the plunge and bought a Nikon D40x digital SLR. So far, I’m loving it!

I’ve already shot 300 photos with it and have started to figure out some of the nuances of the lens, the light meter, and the image sensor. I have much more to learn. To encourage me to keep snapping photos, I’ve decided to start a new feature here at the Minnesota Geek. I’m calling it Photo of the Week. This will be a photo that I’ve taken with my new Nikon in the last month. Let me know what you think of my photos. I’ll also be posting them in my gallery.

–Pete

These are my links for May 9th through May 19th:

• Macworld: News: Opinion: Mac Enterprise backup options are looking up – This article details the various options for backup solutions with Mac OS X
• Xserve RAID – An interesting article about how Apple chooses drives for their Xserve RAID

Recently I was given the URL to a blog written by the family that is caring for Helping Paws dog Tiga, who is a momma dog in the Breeding Program at Helping Paws. Tiga recently had a litter of puppies and her family has been regularly posting pictures of this beautiful group of pups on the blog. To melt your heart please click here.

Tiga’s puppies will be headed to Helping Paws foster homes soon, to begin their training to become service dogs.

Our spring cleaning binge has continued. We have sorted through huge amounts of stuff in our basement, our garage, and our bedroom. We generated enough extra garbage doing this that I discovered just how expensive it is to drop off stuff at the local transfer station. Our garbage hauler is Randy’s Sanitation and they have a waste transfer station in Delano, about 10 miles from our house, where you can drop off extra bags of garbage, compost, and other things you want to get rid of. I brought four bags of compost and three bags of additional garbage. The bill was $18! Yikes! The worst part was the tax. The tax was 17%. Ouch.

The good news is that I learned that they take some stuff that I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of. For $10, they’ll take 20 pound propane tanks and recycle them. I have two that don’t have the fancy new valves that are required if you want to get them refilled and I’ve been struggling to figure out how to get rid of them because the county recycling center wouldn’t take them. For $40 they’ll take my dead riding lawn mower. I can live with that too.

The purging of excess stuff will hopefully continue. The part I need to tackle the most is my office. It has gotten way out of hand and I need to spend some serious time sorting through and reorganizing everything that is in there. I’m not looking forward to doing the task, but I’m looking forward to it being done.

–Pete