BrownStudies » Housekeeping

2 VMWare Fusion tips

brownstudy — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:40:03 +0000

I’ve enjoyed having VMWare Fusion on my MacBook, as it’s made the transition from a PC to a Mac easier. Also, since I now have only the MacBook, I’m able to easily duplicate what I had on the old PC and to edit work documents on my copy of Microsoft Office.

But I hit a few roadblocks the other night (on deadline, of course), so thought I’d document their solutions here.

I had installed a lot of Windows apps and got the warning that there was only about 1GB of hard drive space left on the virtual disk. I thought I’d allocated enough room, but 10GB wasn’t enough. I went into Fusion’s Settings and allocated 20GB. No dice. Still didn’t work. But this excellent tutorial video on the Fusion site shows step-by-step how to create a virtual disk that will grow as the VM grows.
I’d hoped to save my files in one place only on my Mac, and not have to store files in both my Mac and Windows environments. But from within Windows, opening those shared folders was painfully slow and so I reconciled myself to having two separate sets of files to manage. BUT. A search through the VMWare Fusion Forum offered a user’s solution that hit the nail on the head: the Avast anti-virus software in Windows was causing the slowdown. Add the Fusion shared folders to Avast’s exclusion list so it doesn’t attempt to scan any files it finds there. With that setting in place, opening Mac files from within Windows is as quick as opening them from the Finder. At last, I can have one set of documents in one place.
No better time to promote Joe Kissell’s newest e-book, Take Control of VMware Fusion 2. These Take Control books are inexpensive and the best way to get acquainted with Macs.

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What I DIDN’T do this summer

brownstudy — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 02:21:01 +0000

Create accounts on my MacBook and really get a handle on securing it.
Create a custom search engine in Google that would search the sites I tend to read the most: Lifehacker, Marginal Revolution, Kevin Kelly’s sites, 43Folders, Web Worker Daily, my delicious bookmarks, Ask Metafilter, etc. I created a custom engine of usability sites for my User Interface class last spring, so it’s not that hard.
Update my blog’s template and add cool plugins.
Read some recent SILS master’s papers to get an idea of what these papers are about.
Set up my turntable so it hooks into my PC.
Organize my CDs.
Organize the office closets.
Picasa.
Buy an extra power adapter for the MacBook.
Get my ClaimID site looking complete and purty.
Write to Sue.
Write to Cara.
Learn how to get FTP working on this blinkin’ site.
Clean up the categories and tags on this blog.
Research whether I could hook my Airport Extreme router to my current Verizon modem/router box.
Lose 5 pounds of unsightly flab.

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As within, so without

brownstudy — Fri, 09 May 2008 02:21:07 +0000

When my mind and life get cluttered, so do my physical environments. When I lived on my own, it was the whole apartment. Now, it’s pretty much confined to my home office. But as I celebrate the end of the semester and contemplate what to do with myself this summer, I scan the office and see much clutter.

Starting on my far left and moving clockwise (that’s left to right, for you folks who only know digital clock faces), I see:

My graphic novels and comics bookcase, groaning with unread material
Two small wicker baskets holding 1) an Airport Extreme router I’ve not been able to sell and 2) a stack of old MacWorld magazines, a MacBook for Dummies, and a binder of Take Control ebook printouts
On my desk, books to take back to the library
My seltzer can
My overflowing inbasket
My 10-year diary
My MacBook and laptop stand
My desktop PC and monitor with old CDs in the hutch and a 5-ft CD rack sitting atop a 2-drawer filing cabinet
A poster I’ve not had time or opportunity to put on the wall
Stand with a boombox and 2 big messy piles of CDs, with a turntable (unplugged, bereft) on the lower shelf
My banjo case and materials (restarted my lessons this week)
A box where I’m collecting books to take to BDFAR for trade
And let’s stop there, shall we?

Zoiks. Probably the first thing I should do, to put my mind in order, is to put my environment in order. As without, so within.

Jumping the gun on a MacBook?

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Zero-Grief Policy

brownstudy — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 00:21:59 +0000

So I traveled the world only to return home again.

I’ve been looking for a faster, more convenient way to write and post to this blog. I’ve been struck by several ideas I’d like to comment on but the lack of a lightweight, non-fussy app to do this has vexed me. I tried ScribeFire, but it didn’t really do it for me. I’ve looked at a few others; I like the flexibility and speed of a desktop app, like w.bloggar, but I like the convenience of a web-based app as it allows me to write, revise, and publish posts whenever I’m online, whether at work or home or school.

The other reason not to have a dedicated app is that I can’t install it on my work PC; also, when I’m home, I’m usually busy with real work, and blogging is put to the side. So this has to be a tool I can use anywhere in the interstices of my day.

I tried last night to implement the WordPress Blog-by-Email instructions, but the instructions were not clear to me and my experiments didn’t work. Using my Gmail account to blog seemed ideal, but it appears that all the formatting would get stripped out in the process, meaning I could draft the post in email but would have to heavily edit it in WordPress, which struck me as an extra step I didn’t want to take.

I was about to download and evaluate some new apps when I thought, “What’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?” And then I thought, “Adopt a zero-grief policy.”

I ran across that phrase a few years ago when evaluating help-authoring toolkits for a client. None of these packages are easy, but some of them are hyuuuuge, way bigger than my client needed for occasional use. On a HAT mailing list, some guy talked about his method for testing out software, and it was essentially a zero-grief policy: at the first sign of trouble, he tossed it.

That was a pretty liberating thought that saved me a lot of time. I could instantly dismiss some HAT packages simply by starting them and seeing how fearsome their interfaces looked. If they intimidated me, they’d for sure intimidate my client. How many steps did it take to update a topic and re-gen the help file? Too many non-intuitive steps and out it went.

So I looked again at Google Docs, which I remembered allowed me to publish a document to my old Blogger blog. Lo and behold, you can use Google Docs to publish to lots of blog platforms, including WordPress using the Movable Type API. For me, a very simple, zero-grief solution to an annoying problem.

Update: I’ve posted two things tonight from Google Docs and it worked pretty flawlessly. I do still have to access the WordPress control panel to tick the categories and add a title, but by and large, this is the quick and easy solution I was after.

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Another new WP theme

brownstudy — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 03:04:37 +0000

I went to plaintext.org, looking for something clean and minimal, and so am trying out the Barthelme template. I figured out that one reason I wasn’t posting more often was that I didn’t think the Chameleon look was really “my blog” (though I did like the two small administrivia columns to the right of the main column).

Another was that I was busy getting work done and so chose not to blog.

Another was that I really needed a better tool than Scribefire, which, though it worked fine, just didn’t click with me. I’m looking at some offline tools or — I think there’s a way to use email to post, which I would prefer to do.

Another is that managing this site is still a little scary for me, though I can’t imagine why, so I usually stay away until I think I have enough time to mess with it. I think more regular visits will make me less shy of logging in.

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Hello world!

brownstudy — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Instead of deleting the default post when starting a new WordPress blog, why not accept the cheery default title and pronounce this new blog well and truly open for business. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.