27
Aug2007
Fresh Starts: (re)configuring my MacBook
About two weeks ago, my MacBook's hard drive the sudden death that leaves you asking, "why!?". I had backups of just about everything, but it was still a pain to get the replacement drive, restore everything, and reconfigure the machine. I tried to take it as an opportunity to start fresh in a few places, though. I also made a complete disk image when the machine was rebuilt, just in case.
The first decision was dropping Fink in favor of MacPorts. Nothing particularly against Fink, but MacPorts has more recent releases (both of individual ports and of the main software), and being part of Mac OS forge is a plus. I waffled a lot on this one especially after my first attempt to install kcachegrind with MacPorts failed, but after the update to 1.520, it worked perfectly.
I've loved QuickSilver ever since being introduced to it, and I think it completely deserves its cult. However, I barely scratch the surface of its features, and it is a little pokey and memory intensive for how I use it. Namely (http://amarsagoo.info/namely/) is a wee little launcher that only searches applications, which is all I want. Fast, pretty, I love it. To get it out of my Dock I used Dockless (http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/dockless/dockless.html).
There are two things that I've started using recently that aren't exactly replacing anything, but they're too good to overlook. One is sshfs, part of MacFuse (http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). This lets you mount any account you can SSH to as a remote drive. It's fast enough that I can use a local editor at work to edit files on my development sandbox, and it's really nice not to have to deal with samba on my MythTV server. I have an AppleScript that will mount a given share in a way that works with SSHKeychain and agent forwarding ... AppleScript is something else I am oh-so-slowly getting in to these days.
Finally, I recently bought a laptop desk, and I am smitten: http://www.laptopdesk.net/laptopdesk_futura.html. I highly recommend it - very light and portable, fits in my Spire laptop backpack (another very highly recommended product) perfectly, and works as a desk stand also. And $30 seems pretty cheap for a nice laptop desk.
And now I'm off and running with the "new" machine.
The first decision was dropping Fink in favor of MacPorts. Nothing particularly against Fink, but MacPorts has more recent releases (both of individual ports and of the main software), and being part of Mac OS forge is a plus. I waffled a lot on this one especially after my first attempt to install kcachegrind with MacPorts failed, but after the update to 1.520, it worked perfectly.
I've loved QuickSilver ever since being introduced to it, and I think it completely deserves its cult. However, I barely scratch the surface of its features, and it is a little pokey and memory intensive for how I use it. Namely (http://amarsagoo.info/namely/) is a wee little launcher that only searches applications, which is all I want. Fast, pretty, I love it. To get it out of my Dock I used Dockless (http://homepage.mac.com/fahrenba/programs/dockless/dockless.html).
There are two things that I've started using recently that aren't exactly replacing anything, but they're too good to overlook. One is sshfs, part of MacFuse (http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/). This lets you mount any account you can SSH to as a remote drive. It's fast enough that I can use a local editor at work to edit files on my development sandbox, and it's really nice not to have to deal with samba on my MythTV server. I have an AppleScript that will mount a given share in a way that works with SSHKeychain and agent forwarding ... AppleScript is something else I am oh-so-slowly getting in to these days.
Finally, I recently bought a laptop desk, and I am smitten: http://www.laptopdesk.net/laptopdesk_futura.html. I highly recommend it - very light and portable, fits in my Spire laptop backpack (another very highly recommended product) perfectly, and works as a desk stand also. And $30 seems pretty cheap for a nice laptop desk.
And now I'm off and running with the "new" machine.