I’ve been doing a lot of photography with my Canon 5D Mark II 21MP camera, and each image taken in RAW format is about 25MB! So, needless to say, I’ve been using up a whole lot of hard drive space. Even though I upgraded my MacBook Pro to a 500GB drive a month ago, it’s only got less than 100GB left on it. So, I went looking for MORE!

Well, it turns out that Seagate is making a 640GB drive which will actually fit in a standard laptop. While there are a couple of other 2.5″ drives that are larger, they are also thicker and won’t work in most notebooks. So, the Seagate was what I wanted! Only problem – they aren’t selling it yet!

Doah! Well, no matter. Because I found out that I could buy a Seagate FreeAgent Go 640 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive from Amazon.com, and being the warranty voiding freak that I am, I had no problem with trying to rip the drive out of this case to stick in my laptop (the video of me doing just that is below). Here’s the Seagate PDF on the FreeAgent Go for more info.

Well, guess what. It worked! And now I’m posting this article from the world’s first laptop computer with a 640GB hard drive! Of course, that happens to be my 17″ MacBook Pro. Oh, and if you read along I’ll show you how you can do it too!
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Twitter Comments

	RobertVinet This is my kind of hack: "The World's First 640GB Notebook" http://onemansblog.com/640gb (via @johnpoz)
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	prettylink RT @johnpoz: Introducing the World's First 640GB Notebook (It's a MacBook Pro)! http://onemansblog.com/640gb
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	robocco woohoo: RT @johnpoz:Introducing the World 19s First 640GB Notebook (It 19s MY MacBook Pro)! - http://onemansblog.com/640gb
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	johnpoz Introducing the World 19s First 640GB Notebook (It 19s MY MacBook Pro)! - http://onemansblog.com/640gb
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Before I switched to Mac, I used to love to use NetStumbler for Windows. It is a tool that allows you to find any WiFi network and learn a lot about them. This tool even lets you make note of GPS coordinates and do a little thing that people like to call WarDriving. Not that I would know anything about that.

Problem is, there is no NetStumbler for Mac. However! After a lot of searching I came up with a couple of cool alternatives:
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Have any of you Mac users noticed that if you have Time Machine enabled, it will absolutely drag your system down when it decides to perform a back up while you are working? It was driving me absolutely nuts until Cali pointed me to a little freeware application called Time Machine Editor 2.1.

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If you ever try to play certain movies on your Mac without having the correct driver installed, you are going to get nothing more than a black screen. No fear! Perian is here to save you! Just download and install this little applet which adds itself to your System Preferences menu, and you can watch all those movies you weren’t previously able to view.

If that alone doesn’t do it for you, it’s possible you need to install the DivX codec and maybe even the XviD codec. If anyone knows of other drivers that help play media on the Mac, please drop a link in the comments!

I just received a few EVGA USB VGA Adapters from Amazon.com and installed them so that I could hook up two more external monitors to my MacBook Pro. Now that I’ve done that, I may just add a couple more for no reason other than the fact that… I can!

The EVGA USB VGA Adapter lets you add monitors to your PC or Mac at up to 1600×1200 Resolution (or 1680×1050 for widescreen monitors like mine). This is actually a big deal, because there are a few other USB video adapters out there, but they have lower resolution capabilities – like 1280×1024. It’s also a big deal because most of the other adapters out there only have Windows drivers! For some reason, the manufacturers just ignore the Mac population.

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Let’s say that for some reason you decide to make a copy of a DVD. Like you want it for backup purposes or whatever. If you’ve got a Mac, it’s your lucky day. Here is how to do it:

• Use the Finder to copy the VIDEO_TS folder to your local hard drive.
• Download the DVDImager application and install it.
• Stick a blank DVD in your Mac.
• Launch DVDImager and then drag and drop the VIDEO_TS folder onto the DVDImager icon

The rest should be simple. Enjoy your new disc copy!

Yesterday was the day I’ve been waiting on for months. Google finally released the popular, and FREE, Picasa image management software for the Mac!

Let me explain. You see, a while back I was forcibly converted to the Mac at work. At first I complained. A lot. But later it grew on me. Now, even though I hate to admit it, I have to say I actually prefer the Mac for most computing operations. One of the things that I did not enjoy, however, was the pathetic iPhoto software which was pretty much the only game in town for Mac users… until today.

So, Picasa, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you who haven’t tried ooVoo yet, I highly recommend you do so! ooVoo is a video conferencing application like Skype, only much, much better! If you have friends, relatives or colleagues across the country or world you wish to talk to, you simply can’t do better than ooVoo.

I’ve run it on all of my Windows machines with no issue, and it works great. But today I had difficulty trying to install it on my MacBook Pro. However, thanks to Elliott Lee, I managed to solve the problem. So, I figured I’d pass along the solution as well.
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Have you ever had a computer for a long time and then wanted or needed to move all your data to a new one? Or, have you ever had to reinstall Windows just because you’ve loaded so many programs that it’s caused your computer to crash so often that you’re willing to start over? Well, what would you say if I told you it is possible to take a “snapshot” of your entire computer and move or copy the data to another machine in minutes so you can continue right where you left off.

Well you can, and it’s not something that is “coming soon”, it’s here today and has been here for at least a couple of years. The technology is called Virtualization, and there are several software vendors who provide the capability to allow you to do this on any operating system – Mac, Linux, or PC.

Before you ask me “why would I want to virtualize my computer”, let me share a few reasons:

• Portable workspaces – virtualization allows you to move your entire digital workspace from one physical machine to another. You can even use an iPod or USB memory sticks to host a virtual machine!
• Testing and training – rather than loading all kinds of unknown software into your normal computing environment, you can have a virtual machine just for testing. Heck, you could have one for games, one for personal computing, and one for work!
• Disaster recovery – if you always keep a recent backup of your virtual machine, say… on a portable USB hard drive, even if your computer dies you’ll be able to pick back up exactly where you left off without having to reinstall everything.
• Consolidation – Virtual machines are used to consolidate many physical servers into fewer servers, which in turn host virtual machines. Each physical server is reflected as a virtual machine “guest” residing on a virtual machine host system. This is also known as Physical-to-Virtual or ‘P2V’ transformation.

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As many of you know, I’m not a fan of the Mac. I’m a PC power user, so I can happily do anything within Windows, and don’t find the need to feel special about myself by standing out from the crowd by purchasing a computer that has miniscule market share.

Having said all that, for those of you that have been living under a rock, Apple has just launched a pretty cool new laptop that is only about a half an inch thick. The presentation of the new machine was done in typical Apple style – that means, perfectly launched. Just watch the video to see what I mean.
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For those of you in the “Mac Camp” who are forced to work on a PC everyday (you know who you are) here is a little program you can use to make your PC feel more like home…
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