#111 - Migration wizard

I get this question quite often: "How do I get my files from my old mac to my new one? I already booted my new one and didn't the migration wizard, what now?"

Well, in short, you can start the migration wizard manually. It resides in the Tools subfolder of your Applications folder. 

Now go find a firewire cable and hold that 't'.

Good luck 

#110 - warning

I've talked about backing up your mac using different tools in the past, but what's equally important as a backup is the ability to restore it.

In the past I used to boot 1 machine normally and boot the one I wanted to restore in Target Disk Mode by holding the 'T' whilst booting. That way, the second machine would function as any external harddrive, which can then be accessed from the first Mac. I would then restore an image I created earlier using carbon copy cloner or something just like it.

Recently I had to buy a few of the new MacBooks. The nice unibody with black keys and glossy glass screen are gorgeous IMHO, but the lack of a FireWire port is definitely a problem. For one the lack of FW also means there's no Target Disk Mode. (I don't know why they can't implement it using USB, if you do, please enlighten me).
No Target Disk Mode unfortunately also means there is no easy way to re-image these machines the way I'm used to.

So, this is what you need to do:
You need to create a bootable external USB-drive (very cheap these days), boot from that on the MacBook by holding the 'Option'-key and selecting the bootdisk on screen, then restore from an image or from the external drive itself. (I prefer creating extra images on the USB-drive so I can always fall back to some known-good-state, or re-image a machine for different purposes/users quickly and easily)

It's cheaper than requiring 2 macs, but it wasn't something I expected, so I got caught once. Hope you can avoid it after having read this.

#109 - Disk Inventory

We've al got too much junk on our drives and run out of space all the time. So, once in a while you may need to clean up some of that junk. If you want to find a good place to start, try Disk Inventory X, this little app will analyze your disk so you can easily find the culprit that is taking up all that precious hard drive real estate. 

Like most of the tips on this site, this is a free utility, so don't waste time (or space) and go download!

#108 - Free virtualisation

Everybody has his mouth full of virtualisation these days. I must admit Parallels and VMWare Fusion are great products if you want to run another OS on your mac without the trouble of partitioning your drive.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with both of these, on the contrary, but why don't you try a free open source alternative?

There are several options, but I prefer Virtualbox because it has almost exactly the same features as the paid software packages, only for free, so give it a spin.

#107 - GrabFS

A followup from the last tip:

Hackszine does a story on GrabFS a MacFUSE filesystem that gives you screenshots of all running applications.

Leopard only.

#106 - screengrabs from DVD player

The grab utility won't make screenshots when you're playing back a DVD. Until I found this hack I used VLC to playback the DVD and make my grab (it works, but it's not very handy).

So I found this on the Random Tech blog through Digg.com:

How to make a screengrab of DVD Player

In short:
- open terminal and type:
screencapture -i ~/Desktop/dvd.png
- press space and select the DVD player window
Done

It seems the quality is not really the same (it wasn't the same in my tests anyway), but I guess a lot can be fixed in Photoshop or the likes.

Ow and before I forget: you'll also need to trim the edges of the window...

Happy New Year to all of you!

#105 - Improve your stacks

Seems like everyone these days is trying to improve the Leopard GUI. I found this great idea via del.icio.us.

Simple + elegant = brilliant.

Finally stacks make sense.